Alice & Bob reports Phase 1 progress in France’s PROQCIMA quantum program

Alice & Bob says it completed Phase 1 work in France’s PROQCIMA quantum program, building and testing three cat qubit demonstrators. The results add new data on error correction, logical error rates and hardware readiness as France pushes toward two 1,000-logical-qubit prototypes by 2032.

Why it matters: - PROQCIMA is France’s national push to build two universal quantum computer prototypes, each capable of supporting 1,000 logical qubits and ready for industrialization by 2032. - Alice & Bob’s results are a concrete checkpoint for cat qubit error correction, one of the main technical paths toward fault-tolerant quantum computing. - The Phase 1 outcome helps show whether the company’s approach can scale from laboratory hardware toward a useful quantum processor.

What happened: - Alice & Bob shared a summary of its Phase 1 results from PROQCIMA, the French government’s quantum computing program. - The company assembled and operated three independent demonstrators, including two on 6-qubit chips and one on a 12-qubit chip. - Alice & Bob said the demonstrators were built under a commitment made when Phase 1 began in 2024. - The work was supervised by the company’s MnR monitoring and recalibration software.

The details: - PROQCIMA is led by the French Defense Innovation Agency and the Direction générale de l'Armement. - The program is structured as a 10-year competition. - Three candidates will continue after the first four years. - Two candidates will ultimately be selected to continue beyond year eight. - Five companies were selected for the program: Alice & Bob, Pasqal, Quandela, Quobly and C12. - Phase 1 was designed to test technical and industrial feasibility. - Each candidate had to show technological maturity through development and testing on real hardware. - Alice & Bob said it delivered an integrated multi-block demonstrator with partial functional validation. - The company said the hardware work demonstrated the core operations of its error-correction architecture on real hardware. - The team demonstrated each building block of a cat qubit logical qubit, with further optimization still underway. - The measured results included noise-biased CNOT gates between cat qubits that preserved protection against bit flips. - The demonstrators also ran a measure-and-reset sequence for auxiliary qubits that read the error syndrome and re-prepared each qubit for the next error-correction cycle. - That measure-and-reset performance was broadly in line with program targets. - Alice & Bob ran multiple cycles of a three data qubit distance-3 repetition code, the smallest code able to correct a quantum error. - The company measured the logical error rate across the full register. - The logical error rate was not yet below threshold. - Alice & Bob also demonstrated a non-Clifford gate on a cat qubit. - The company described that gate as an essential ingredient for universal fault-tolerant quantum computing and a first step toward producing the magic states the approach requires. - Alongside the hardware results, Alice & Bob built a digital twin of the processor using measured performance data. - Simulations on the digital twin showed the improvements needed to operate below the error-correction threshold. - The first improvement identified was extending qubit coherence consistently across the chip. - The MnR software ran around the clock and operated when the quantum processing unit was idle. - The software measured performance across more than 50 indicators per qubit. - The system detected when a qubit drifted and needed recalibration. - Alice & Bob said that detecting and correcting drifts could previously cost up to a day of operating time. - The company said the software keeps the processor at a consistent performance level.

Between the lines: - The update suggests Alice & Bob has moved from concept validation toward integrated hardware testing, but the hardware still has work to do before it reaches the error-correction threshold. - The focus on coherence, recalibration and logical error rates shows that the bottleneck is no longer just building qubits, but keeping them stable and usable at scale. - France’s program is competitive as well as technical, so Phase 1 results matter as much for selection pressure as for engineering progress.

What's next: - Alice & Bob still needs to improve qubit coherence across the chip and push the logical error rate below threshold. - PROQCIMA will narrow the field after the first four years, with three candidates moving forward. - The longer-term goal remains two selected teams progressing beyond year eight toward industrialized prototypes by 2032.

The bottom line: - Alice & Bob says its cat qubit platform cleared a key Phase 1 milestone, but the company still must prove it can suppress errors far enough for fault-tolerant quantum computing at scale.