Alice & Bob reports cat-qubit bit-flip lifetimes of 44 minutes, hours on 12-qubit chip
Alice & Bob, a superconducting hardware developer, reports in a technical update titled "A Cat Qubit That Jumps Every Hour" an average idle bit-flip lifetime of 44 minutes (95% CI: 33 to 60 minutes) on a single-qubit Galvanic Cat device with an average photon number of 11. The figure comes from 61 hours of continuous monitoring in which 41 quantum jumps were recorded, and the company's analysis found memoryless Poisson statistics. On its 12-qubit Helium 2 processor (physical qubits), measured bit-flip lifetimes included 189 minutes for Cat 1, 252 minutes for Cat 8 and 189 minutes for Cat 12, at photon numbers of 11 to 16. On the single-qubit device the team also measured a phase-flip lifetime of 420 ns and a Z-gate fidelity of 94.2% in 26.5 ns.