Alice & Bob has announced new research results showing that their cat qubits can resist one of the main errors in quantum computers, the bit-flip, for more than one hour. The company measured hour-long bit-flip times, a considerable advance over the previous record of 430 seconds (about seven minutes) set in 2024. The results were achieved on the company’s latest qubit design, the Galvanic Cat, which is used on their Helium 2 chip.
At a mean photon number of 11, the team was able to measure bit-flip times between 33 and 60 minutes with a 95% confidence interval. The experiment also demonstrated a Z gate with a 94.2% fidelity in 26.5 ns and a phase-flip time of 420 ns. The new bit-flip result is four times longer than the company’s 2030 roadmap target of 13 minutes, solidifying one of the key pillars of cat qubit technology.
By suppressing bit-flip errors, cat qubits allow for more efficient error-correcting codes that require fewer qubits, which could reduce hardware requirements for large-scale quantum computers by up to 200 times. This advancement is positioned as a step in the company’s roadmap toward an early fault tolerant quantum computer (eFTQC) with 100 logical qubits to address first use cases in materials science.
The company notes that the result surpasses typical timescales for cosmic rays impacts, suggesting some level of insensitivity by cat qubits to such events. The next step for the company will be to evaluate the performance of this result under a two-qubit gate (CNOT).
Read the full announcement in the Alice & Bob press release here and the related blog post for more details here.
September 27, 2025
