TheQubitReport

Quantum computing has a size problem. We think cat qubits solve a big part of it 🐈‍⬛ To break RSA-2048 in about three days, we would need around 1 million standard superconducting qubits, about 33 000 m² and circa 500 MW, roughly the power consumption of Brussels 🇧🇪. With cat qubits, it's 23 000 qubits, 800 m² and 12 MW. About what an high-speed train runs on 🚄. Why does that matter? Every qubit comes with cryogenics, wiring, control electronics and cost. A machine consuming as much as a whole city is a machine you could build, but nobody will buy. One that fits in a small building, powered by a single wind turbine, starts to look like an engineering project. 🏗️ The savings come down to physics. Cat qubits resist bit-flips by design, so error correction only has to fight phase-flips. We’ve shown this on our Boson 4 chip in 2024 and more recently on the Helium chip, where idle bit-flips times reached 1h 🧪 alice-bob.com/blog/just-out-… This is a theory paper, such a machine still has to be built and the challenges to overcome are many. But a smaller machine is a much more realistic one, and arguably one that could be built sooner. The world's transition to quantum-resistant cryptography has never been more urgent than now. More on the findings this Wednesday in the blog post from the study's authors.👀 In the meantime, have a look at our infographic 👉 🖼️ alice-bob.com/applications/c… For those of you who want to dive deeper here's the full paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2610.37839 #QuantumComputing #CatQubits #ShorsAlgorithm #FaultTolerance #PostQuantumCryptography