Macroscopic bit-flip times in a superconducting cat-qubit

A quantum system interacts with its environment -- if ever so slightly -- no matter how much care is put into isolating it. Therefore, quantum bits undergo errors, putting dauntingly difficult constraints on the hardware suitable for quantum computation. In this talk I will describe an emerging qubit that we have coined the cat-qubit. Quantum information is encoded in the field quadrature space of a superconducting resonator endowed with a special mechanism that dissipates photons in pairs. This process pins down two computational states to separate locations in phase space. The underlying premise is that bit-flips are exponentially suppressed as this separation is increased, and therefore only phase-flips remain to be corrected via a one-dimensional quantum error correction code. In this talk I will describe our recent progress towards the protection of quantum information in cat-qubits.