Quantum computing firm Alice & Bob has made its quantum process available to customers through the cloud via Google.
The startup this week announced the immediate availability of its Boson 4 single cat-qubit chip series on Google Cloud Marketplace.
“When my co-founder and I started Alice & Bob, many thought cat qubits would never be more than a lab concept. We are now the first company to make a cat qubit chip available for everyone to use,” said Théau Peronnin, CEO and co-founder of Alice & Bob. “We are convinced Boson 4 will spark interest among researchers and we are committed to continuously extending the range of experiments which can be performed with it.”
As well as Alice and Bob’s Felis Cloud services, quantum firm IonQ’s processors are also available through the Google Cloud Platform.
“It’s great to see continued advancement in the field. Protecting quantum information from one of the two errors that corrupt it is a promising path to making a robust quantum computer,” said Hartmut Neven, VP of engineering at Google. “The cat qubit is an interesting technology to have available for experimentation.”
Alice & Bob claim its superconducting ‘cat qubits’ are protected from bit-flip errors by design, meaning additional error-correcting qubits are only needed to tackle the remaining phase-flip errors. The company said this approach makes it possible to create fault-tolerant computers using far fewer qubits.
The launch of Boson 4 on Google Cloud marks the first time a cat qubit has become available to the public.
Future chip iterations will focus on improving the phase-flip performance and enabling multi-qubit operation. The company is working on two multi-qubit chip generations: Hydrogen, to detect quantum errors; and the 16-qubit Helium to remove phase-flips through error correction.
Founded in 2020, Alice & Bob is based in Paris, France, and Boston, Massachusetts. The company has raised €30 million ($32.47m) in funding.
IBM, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services also offer access to quantum processors through the cloud, while most quantum firms also provide access through their own portals as well as on-premise deployments.
IBM offers access to its own quantum computers hosted at its facilities, while Microsoft, Amazon, and Google's respective platforms offer access to other company's quantum computers hosted at the third-party quantum companies' facilities via APIs. All three cloud providers are also developing their own quantum systems.
