Alice & Bob Demonstrates Multi-Hour Physical Bit-Flip Suppression on Single-Cat and Helium 2 Processors
AI-summarised brief · reviewed before publication
Alice & Bob announced that its bosonic cat‑qubit hardware achieved macroscopic bit‑flip lifetimes longer than one hour. In single‑qubit tests the average idle lifetime was 44 minutes, while a 12‑qubit Helium 2 processor maintained stability for three to four hours. A 61‑hour continuous run on a single cavity recorded 41 quantum‑jump events, fitting a memoryless Poisson model. The team also demonstrated 94.2 % gate fidelity for continuous Bloch‑sphere Z‑rotations in 26.5 ns, confirming that phase‑flip noise did not degrade coherence. These results validate the error‑model assumptions used in earlier fault‑tolerance analyses that required a one‑hour bit‑flip baseline for large‑scale Shor implementations, and they show that idle devices can meet the concatenated cat‑code threshold, though two‑qubit gate performance remains to be proven in future experiments.
💡 Why It Matters
- · Demonstrating hour‑scale idle stability pushes bosonic qubits into the practical regime for fault‑tolerant architectures, turning a theoretical concatenation threshold into a hardware reality.
