We often say that cat qubits can't be compared💎, but for once, let's give it a try. Cat qubits are unique, but we can gain a better understanding by comparing them to more common superconducting qubits, like those used by Google in their latest experiment. 👉 lnkd.in/edNjt5m2 Both systems share similar constraints and advantages, but differently from any other superconducting qubit, cats are protected from bit-flip errors. This is achieved by increasing the number of photons in the cat's memory, which exponentially reduces bit-flip errors while phase-flip errors increase only linearly. 🤓 One of the most impressive results in Google's latest paper, is to use a chain of 75 transmon qubits🧩to run a repetition error correcting code. Like the photons in cat qubits, this code exponentially suppresses one type of error while linearly increasing the other, reaching a plateau where errors no longer decrease.📉 The analogy has it's limits but its worth noting that the lifetime at which bit-flips saturate in both systems is similar: ⏰60 minutes for Google's 57-qubit code and ⏱️7 minutes for a single 12-photon cat qubit. And this is the key intuition behind the strength of cat qubits... 💡A single cat can implement a similar quantum object as dozens of standard qubits, before error correction is even run. Stay tuned for our next post, where we will explain how Google's experiment is one step ahead of what we can achieve with a single cat, and what we plan to do to create Alice & Bob's version of a logical qubit.🔖 #QuantumComputing #CatQubits #GoogleQuantumAI