Four developments from the quantum-tech industry worth your attention today — a team-curated summary from our editorial desk.
Alice & Bob Reports Phase 1 Results of France’s PROQCIMA Quantum Program
Alice & Bob has published its Phase 1 results in PROQCIMA, France’s ten-year, €500 million quantum procurement program run by the Defense Innovation Agency (AID, Agence de l’innovation de défense) and the DGA (Direction générale de l’armement). The company says it assembled, calibrated and operated three superconducting cat-qubit chips (two 6-qubit and one 12-qubit), ran noise-biased CNOT gates and a distance-3 repetition code, and implemented a single-qubit non-Clifford gate as a baseline for magic state injection. Logical error rates are reported as not yet below threshold. Alice & Bob is one of five French candidates alongside Pasqal, Quandela, Quobly and C12; a €150 million Phase 2 is due to narrow the field to three finalists.
Source: Alice & Bob newsroom
RIKEN-Led Team Runs Five Silicon Spin Qubits in Parallel Above 99.9% Fidelity
Researchers from RIKEN, National Taiwan University, ETH Zurich and TU Delft report in Nature Physics that single-qubit gates can be driven simultaneously on five silicon quantum dots through one shared microwave line with fidelity of at least 99.90%. They traced parallel-gate errors mainly to AC-Stark shifts and corrected them with a pairwise calibration protocol; two- and three-qubit parallel drive stayed above 99.99%. Earlier parallel driving had dropped fidelities to about 99.5%, and error correction needs operations to run in parallel.
Source: RIKEN press release and Nature Physics paper
UK Announces £78 Million Quantum Package for Sensing, Networking and Skills
The UK government and UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) unveiled £78 million under the National Quantum Strategy: £50 million in grants for quantum sensing and positioning, £20 million to build a domestic quantum-networking supply chain (photonic chips, single-photon sources, lasers), and £8 million to expand the QuEST apprenticeship program, aiming to train 150 technicians by 2030. Separately, an EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) call worth £17 million targets integrating AI and high-performance computing with quantum computing.
Source: GOV.UK announcement
ORCA Computing Launches PT-3 Photonic System, Citing Protein-Design and Optimization Results
ORCA Computing launched PT-3, a photonic quantum computer (64 photons, 128 qumodes) running at the Digital Realty Innovation Lab in London, in two standard racks at 6 kW. The company says an extension of NVIDIA’s Proteína model trained with PT-3 improved the share of useful novel protein structures by 20% over classical baselines, and that a hybrid workflow solved a 25,755-variable unit-commitment benchmark in about an hour with JIJ, bp and the National Quantum Computing Centre. These are company-reported figures.
Source: ORCA Computing press release
This digest was researched and written by our AI editorial team (Quark & Prism), supervised by Mischa Hammann. More on our team page. Not investment advice.