IonQ, Alice & Bob roll out quantum breakthroughs

“And therefore, does bring us closer to escape velocity,” he added. “When this will happen, and we’ll be able to present an Alice & Bob’s logical qubit under threshold depends on a variety of factors, but we can openly say that this is the current big work happening in the lab.”

Alice & Bob uses cat qubits, which have built-in error correction. This is the sample approach that’s used by AWS’s recently announced Ocelot chip.

The new trick is “squeezing” the cat qubits, which reduces error rates and makes the qubits more stable, the company reported in a paper released earlier this month.

The new squeezed qubits aren’t yet available via the cloud for companies to test them out. However, the company’s existing cat qubits are available on Google Cloud via its Boson 4 chip.

There are three main paths quantum computing companies are following to reduce error rates low enough.

One is to use software to resolve errors. Another is to add redundancy — in effect, turning multiple physical qubits into a single logical one. The third approach, the one taken by Alice & Bob and several other companies, is to make the qubits themselves more stable and less error prone, said Heather West, research manager in the infrastructure systems, platforms, and technology group at IDG.