June 1, 2025 Nord Quantique says it has demonstrated a key step toward practical quantum computing — using a single qubit to detect its own errors without additional hardware.
The Sherbrooke-based startup announced Thursday it has successfully encoded error detection into its own quantum device — a crucial milestone on the path to fault-tolerant quantum computing. If the company’s approach proves scalable, it could dramatically reduce the size and energy requirements of future quantum systems, enabling them to fit in a standard data center rather than massive industrial facilities.
Unlike traditional designs that require hundreds or thousands of qubits to stabilize a single operation, Nord Quantique uses a type of microwave photon qubit that exploits different vibration “modes” within a supercooled cavity. This setup allowed the company to implement what’s known as the Tesseract error detection code using the same hardware that performs the computation.
CEO Julien Camirand Lemyre said the company’s approach represents “better ways to quantum error correction” that could make the technology easier to scale. Experts in the field agree the work is promising. “It’s a very smart choice not going head on with the other people,” said Yvonne Gao of the National University of Singapore, praising Nord’s distinct approach to the problem.
Nord is one of three Canadian companies — along with B.C.’s Photonic and Toronto’s Xanadu — now competing for funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). While no single solution to quantum error correction has emerged, the fact that small Canadian firms are advancing novel methods has made them serious contenders in the global quantum race.
