Today, UK error-correction specialist Riverlane and startup Atlantic Quantum announced they have entered into a strategic partnership to scale fluxonium-based qubit architecture and advance the technology towards useful quantum computing.
It is a really encouraging time to be writing about quantum tech. Beyond the fact that it is increasingly being acknowledged as a strategically important technology by security agencies and governments globally, after decades of feeling just five years out of reach, the sector has truly begun to gather momentum.
And what is increasingly driving the acceleration is partnerships where two players have honed their specific part of the technology to a point where it makes sense to join forces. As such, the news that Riverlane and Atlantic Quantum are coming together to work towards fault-tolerance is a significant step on the path to useful quantum computing.
Logical qubits and error correction
Qubits are the fundamental units of quantum information, used in quantum computing instead of classical bits. These can, if all goes according to the quantum evangelists’ plan, perform computations impossible for even classical supercomputers.
They could also change how we think about cryptography, revolutionise precision medicine, and solve climate change. The only problem is, they are very sensitive to interference, or so-called noise. This leads to high error rates in computations and prevents quantum computing technologies from scaling reliably.
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This is where Riverlane’s technology comes in. The Cambridge-based startup’s quantum error correction (QEC) stack Delta Flow turns large numbers of unreliable physical qubits into smaller numbers of “logical” qubits.
The team of qubits can then “check” each other’s work, to ensure a more accurate final computation. This makes it feasible to build fault-tolerant quantum computers, where the system can continue to operate correctly even if some components fail.
Promising pathway for reliable quantum computing
Atlantic Quantum is developing quantum computers following the pathway of fluxonium superconducting qubits. These, like other superconducting qubits, operate at very low temperatures.
However, one of their advantages is that they are less sensitive to certain types of “noise” that disrupt the quantum states. This makes them potentially more robust and reliable than other types of superconducting qubits. Indeed, Atlantic Quantum’s qubit architecture has demonstrated the lowest error rates of any superconducting qubits.
“In Atlantic Quantum, we’ve found a partner with the same long-held view as us that we need quantum error correction to achieve fault-tolerance in quantum computing,” Steve Brierly, founder and CEO of Riverlane, said. “However, this partnership also recognises that this challenge can’t be solved in isolation, and progress depends on close collaboration between players across the quantum stack.”
Transatlantic connections
Riverlane, founded in 2016, has offices in Cambridge, UK, and in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Atlantic Quantum, founded in 2022 by Bharath Kannan, Simon Gustavsson, Tim Menke, William Oliver, and Youngkyu Sung, also has offices in Cambridge — the one in Massachusetts — as well as in Gothenburg, Sweden.
The company recently won an Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) contract to build entangled logical qubits in collaboration with Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, MIT in the US, Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, the Université de Sherbrooke in Canada, and Zurich Instruments, again in Switzerland.
Atlantic Quantum’s fluxonium superconducting qubits is but one of the approaches to building a fault-tolerant quantum computer. Those providing software to work with qubits, either for error correction or programming languages, are often quick to establish that they are “agnostic” in this respect — at least in an official capacity.
This means that although they might personally believe there are certain pathways more likely to scale than others, their products work with all approaches. Which, naturally, makes sense for such a budding industry where commercialisation remains elusive. We are bound to see more partnerships like these as the sector continues to mature.