Autonomous cooling of Kerr-cat qubits to minutes-long bit-flip times
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arXiv: 2611.04868v1 · Summary page
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A quantum memory that cools its own escape routes
Cat qubits encode information in opposite coherent states of an oscillator, making some errors much less likely than others. In superconducting Kerr-cat devices, a driven, double-well energy landscape helps hold those states apart, but unwanted excitations can let the system switch between them. Researchers now show that the nonlinear interaction responsible for confinement can also remove those excitations: when a transition within a well matches a lossy readout mode, energy flows out of the qubit. Spectroscopy and relaxation measurements support this cooling mechanism, and the measured bit-flip time reaches 450 s.
The attraction is protection without a separate cooling drive or extra circuit elements. The team also demonstrates fast Z gates without measurable loss of bit-flip protection and readout with a bit-flip probability below 10⁻⁶ per measurement. This does not eliminate the other major error channel: phase flips remain consistent with intrinsic photon loss at operating points with seconds-long bit-flip times. The broader promise is hardware that makes errors sufficiently uneven for error correction to become less demanding.
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