Alice & Bob

Quantum hackathons are great because everyone arrives thinking they’ll solve quantum algorithms. Then someone hands them a drifting cat qubit. 🫣 At ETH Zürich, 170+ students gathered for the biggest hackathon Alice & Bob has taken part in across Europe so far. Our challenge, using machine learning to keep cat qubits calibrated under real experimental conditions, ended up being one of the most requested by participants. 🤖🐈 It was refreshing to see so many students excited about improving quantum hardware performance, not just running algorithms. 🔧 Teams came up with creative ways to handle drift and experimental noise, with the winning team going as far as designing "vortex cats". 👀 A lot of the ideas were smart, with a level of persistence that coffee alone probably can’t explain. ☕️💡 ️ Big thanks to Quantum Engineering Commission, Laurent Prost, David Schlegel for making this happen, and to Shantanu Jha for designing the challenge. And of course, a shoutout to the winning team🏆: Francesco Marcolongo, Nicolò Battocletti, Lorenzo Sannino, @Lorenzo Biagi #QuantumComputing #QuantumTech #CatQubits #MachineLearning #QuantumEngineering #Hackathon #DeepTech

Scaling quantum computing also means scaling how quantum chips are made. ⚛️ This week, the €50M SUPREME Superconducting European Quantum Pilot Line project, co-funded by the European Union through Chips JU, officially kicked off in Helsinki, bringing together 23 partners across Europe to help scale superconducting quantum technologies 🚀 Alice & Bob is proud to be part of this initiative focused on making quantum chip manufacturing more reliable, reproducible, and scalable. Because building a great qubit one time is hard... Building thousands of them consistently is the challenge. Through SUPREME, as a consortium partner, we will help design, test, and validate advanced fabrication processes for our cat-qubit chips, while assessing whether these manufacturing flows can meet industrial-quality requirements. ⚡ The project is an exciting step toward expanding the foundry capabilities for superconducting quantum chips in Europe, and strengthening its quantum manufacturing ecosystem. 💪 Also, a major step forward for scalable quantum computing in Europe! 🇪🇺 #QuantumComputing #QuantumTechnology #Quantum #DeepTech #SuperconductingQubits #Innovation #EuropeanUnion #QuantumEcosystem

One of the most refreshing things about the HPC User Forum? Nobody was treating quantum computing like magic. 🪄 The conversations were technical, collaborative, and practical, focused on how to actually integrate quantum systems into existing HPC environments: 🤝 From software stacks and orchestration to identifying where quantum acceleration could actually be meaningful. And after seeing the level of maturity already present in HPC + AI, that realism makes sense and what that could eventually look like for quantum computing as the technology matures. Some of the (non quantum) demos and deployments presented included: 🌊 tsunami prediction systems 🏓 autonomous robots playing ping-pong against professional athletes 🚀 compute infrastructure supporting NASA’s Artemis mission For us, that was probably the clearest takeaway of the forum: quantum computing doesn’t just need better hardware performance, it needs to fit into real scientific and industrial workflows. 🏭 The openness of the discussions stood out too. Sessions with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory , NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD tackled topics like numerical precision in HPC computing, ROI challenges, and staffing pipelines with a level of honesty that’s rare in this industry. One memorable moment was Bob Sorensen's keynote on introducing quantum technologies into classical HPC ecosystems step by step, grounded in operational realities rather than hype. 🔥 Another was when our presentations prompted the question from the non-expert support staff "what do you mean by a universal computer?". Quantum computing provided an excuse to educate the general public more about Turing machines, the tragedy of Alan Turing...and to jointly discover the fact that someone has created a Turing Machine board game! 🎲 Seeing our collaborative report (https://lnkd.in/eFDHZGnG) referenced especially “Appendix 3” as a kind of Rosetta Stone for mapping quantum algorithms onto HPC applications was a humbling moment. 🥳 We were also happy to have Kevin D. Kissell present Alice & Bob’s cat qubit approach to the HPC community, alongside our work around OpenQSE and open quantum software stacks designed for HPC integration. ⚡ Great to participate in these conversations alongside QuEra Computing Inc., IQM Quantum Computers and the broader quantum ecosystem! #HPC #QuantumComputing #HighPerformanceComputing #QuantumTech

Entering the right rooms at the right time! 🏛️🐈 At the QED-C® Quantum Summit in the heart of Washington, D.C. 🇺🇸, Alice & Bob was alongside the people who are shaping what comes next for quantum💡, from industry leaders to policymakers and investors and we were honored to be there to say the least! Highlight: Juliette Peyronnet, our U.S. General Manager, had the great opportunity to speak with Darío Gil, Under Secretary for Science and Genesis Mission Director, U.S. Department of Energy, and one of the key figures shaping major science and technology programs in the country - about quantum co-processors and how they could integrate into real HPC systems. 🖥️⚙️ She also joined the Industry Leadership Forum panel alongside NVIDIA, D-Wave, Infleqtion, and Deep33. The discussion focused on where things stand today: commercialization, capital allocation, and early signs of traction 📊 Questions around the usefulness of quantum came up, and here is our take: Usefulness will not come from scale alone, but from how quantum is integrated into existing workflows. We already see concrete paths forward, for example in quantum chemistry, where HPC handles most of the pipeline and fault-tolerant QPUs step in on the hardest parts like energy estimation. It is a division of labor, not a replacement. ⚛️ Encouraging to see the conversation moving in that direction 🚀 Elica (Elitsa) Kyoseva, Alan Baratz, Matthew Kinsella, Joab Rosenberg, Luiza Savage #QuantumComputing #Quantum

We said we were building production infrastructure. Now, that chapter is coming to life. 🚀🏭 Here, one of the largest quantum labs in Europe, is where we'll turn our cat-qubit prototypes into useful quantum computers. ⚛️ That means testing more chips, faster, so we can build bigger, better systems that are ready for the real world. And, we're building the teams who can run it: engineers who turn physics into process, and research into product. 🧠🔁 🎬 Let Antoine, Jeanne, Tarek, Lilia, Antonio, and Matthieu take you behind the scenes of quantum engineering at Alice & Bob, at the infrastructure scale. ⚙️ Full video here: 👉 https://lnkd.in/e4waGhVc 💡For more on why we built this lab, and where it fits in our journey: 👉https://lnkd.in/dXVSM7RM More to come. Watch this space! #QuantumComputing #QuantumLab #CatQubits

The chip is just part of the story. 🔬⚛️ It's about making the whole system work. The fridge, the control electronics, the cabling, the entire environment around it... every layer has to come together. At that point, it’s no longer a small lab experiment. It’s systems engineering. 🎛️🧠 🎞️ Watch the full video: 👉 https://lnkd.in/e4waGhVc #QuantumComputing #QuantumEngineering #FTQC

Useful quantum computing is the next moonshot. Now it's time to build the rocket. ⚛️🌑🔧 At Alice & Bob, we spent our early years controlling a single cat qubit 🐈⬛, understanding its physics. Now the challenge is to scale these systems, and that’s a serious engineering problem. Day to day, that means tweaking a chip design again and again, aligning components that shrink when you cool them to temperatures lower than parts of outer space, or tuning signals with absurd precision. 🧠🔩 No one does it alone. Now we’re nearly 250 people, 30 nationalities, tackling one of the biggest challenges today: building a useful quantum computer. Hear about it from the team. 🎥 Full video here: 👉 https://lnkd.in/e4waGhVc #quantumcomputing #quantumphysics #quantumlab #deeptech

Energy innovation needs new physics, and that’s where quantum comes in. ⚡️🐱 At this year’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Energy Innovation Summit, we got to bring that conversation to life on the expo floor. ⚛️🚀 One highlight: a visit from Darío Gil, Under Secretary for Science and Innovation at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Director of the Genesis Mission, and Jyotsna Sharma, ARPA-E's QC3 Program Director. We walked them through our cat qubit tech and talked about our recent $3.9M award from the QC3 program. 🐈⬛⚙️ Our project aims to discover more sustainable magnets without rare earth elements. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gmCwdH4p ⚡️🧲 It was also great to see quantum taking up a lot more space at the Summit than last year, it definitely felt like momentum is building. ✨ Dario Gil's keynote was all about quantum computing’s potential, and how bringing quantum, HPC and AI together is key to the next wave of scientific breakthroughs. That’s what the US Genesis Mission is about: building a shared platform across these technologies, with the goal of doubling scientific productivity in a decade. 💡 📈 On the exhibitor floor, quantum was hard to miss: QC program exhibitors like Alice & Bob, Infleqtion, and Phasecraft drew a lot of traffic. 👀 We talked about: • Fundamental questions about quantum computing and its applications for energy 🤓 • Big curiosity about the physical realities of quantum 🧊 • The energy footprint of running quantum computers Great to be part of these conversations about the future of energy, and to keep working to make quantum a practical tool for hard challenges. 🌍💪

Who is Alice? Who is Bob? 🧐 Not our founders. Definitely not random. If you’ve crossed paths with them before, you already know there’s more to the story. If not… you’re about to 🕶️ -> https://bit.ly/4tEgEGv #QuantumComputing #Physics #DeepTech #Cryptography #QuantumPhysics #STEM #TechCulture #AliceAndBob

A cat. A box. Poison.🐈📦🧪 Except… what if the cat never stayed in the box? 👀 Suppose he's been around longer than you'd think, making his way through experiments, turning up where things become… interesting, and eventually ending up with us. Here’s the true story of Schrödinger’s cat as it’s never been told before 😏 You may wish to meet him 🤓 -> https://bit.ly/4vqJpZe #Physics #QuantumComputing #DeepTech #ThoughtExperiment #LabLife #SchrodingersCat