Riverlane Partners with Atlantic Quantum on Error Correction

July 17, 2024 — Quantum error correction technology company Riverland and Atlantic Quantum, a developer of scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computers, today announced a partnership to work on quantum error correction. The partnership will combine Riverlane’s quantum error correction (QEC) stack (‘Deltaflow’) and Atlantic Quantum’s superconducting fluxonium-based qubit architecture to advance quantum computing.

Qubits are the building blocks of quantum computers, but they are prone to noise. Interactions between the qubits and the inherently noisy environment are the dominant source of errors in quantum operations on all quantum computing platforms. A set of techniques called quantum error correction (QEC) can detect and correct these errors before they impact the execution of a quantum algorithm. However, QEC remains a challenge due to the high-fidelity quantum operations required in the correction scheme.

Atlantic Quantum is building fault-tolerant quantum computers using a superconducting fluxonium qubit architecture, which differs from the more conventional superconducting transmon qubit in construction, operation, and underlying physics. Published research shows that Atlantic Quantum’s qubit architecture achieves the lowest error rates for superconducting qubits, exceeding fidelities of 99.9% for two-qubit gates and 99.997% for single-qubit gates. In Atlantic Quantum’s mission to build quantum computers with superior error rates, scalability, and clock speeds, the team continues to pioneer the latest cutting-edge technologies for error rate reduction.

Riverlane is building a quantum error correction (QEC) stack named ‘Deltaflow’. This consists of a set of interconnected technologies designed to help quantum computers detect and correct the huge volume of errors currently preventing them from achieving useful scale. It does this by turning large numbers of unreliable qubits into smaller numbers of reliable ‘logical’ qubits, thus enabling the system to decode errors and execute logical operations in real-time.

Through this collaboration, both companies hope to advance unique quantum error correction techniques that accelerate the pathway to quantum advantage.

Steve Brierley, Founder & CEO of Riverlane said: “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. 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. The team at Atlantic Quantum has already done excellent work in building a hardware architecture with such a low error rate, and we’re excited to see how integrating our quantum error correction stack will help advance progress even further.”

Bharath Kannan, Co-founder & CEO of Atlantic Quantum said:“Quantum error correction is the only way to enable sustained quantum computation and is foundational to all useful applications. We are excited to collaborate with the QEC experts at Riverlane to maximize the potential of our world-class hardware as we scale to larger systems.”