QuiX Ships Alquor 2.0 Photonic Processor for Research Labs
QuiX Quantum has released Alquor 2.0, a rack-mounted photonic processor that swaps a room full of hand-aligned optics for a programmable chip. It’s a research instrument for photonic quantum-optics experiments, sold in three configurations, the largest running 32 modes, priced from €240,000 to €790,000. What sets it apart from the usual product announcement is who’s already using the previous model.
The track record is the pitch
According to the August 4 press release by QuiX, more than 20 of the earlier Alquor processors are in deployment, and the important part is where.
Independent groups have published results on Alquor hardware, apart from QuiX itself. Teams at ENEA and INFN, Paderborn with HQS, Fraunhofer, Freie Universität Berlin with NASA Ames, Twente, and a Queensland-led group at the Pawsey supercomputing center have run experiments on these chips, including a deterministic Grover search at a reported 99.77% success rate and photon distillation for fault-tolerant photonic schemes.
That external body of work is the strongest evidence for the platform, more than any spec sheet. QuiX, which also builds a room-temperature photonic computer aimed at data centers, has more outside validation than most quantum-hardware makers can show.
That said, these experiments are photonic quantum-optics demonstrations, the kind a programmable interferometer enables. None of them is a quantum computer outpacing a classical one, the milestone the field keeps carefully redefining, and QuiX isn’t claiming otherwise.
Built for convenience
Alquor is a programmable linear optical interferometer built on silicon nitride, the same integrated-photonics material track that printing techniques aim to extend, running at room temperature with low optical loss. Its value is practical.
Instead of spending weeks aligning and stabilizing a bulk-optics rig on a table, a lab gets a stable, reprogrammable chip it can drive from Python, which makes experiments reproducible and quicker to iterate. Caterina Taballione, QuiX’s commercial lead, framed it around that pain point.
“Photonic quantum research should not be limited by the complexity of repeatedly configuring, aligning, and stabilizing optical table setups. Alquor 2.0 gives researchers a programmable and reproducible platform.”
The 2.0 changes are real but incremental, a current-driver control scheme to cut electrical crosstalk, air cooling for stability, a cleaner software stack, and hot-swappable photonic assemblies. The “up to 1,000 modulators” line is design headroom rather than what the current systems ship. Underneath this is the same integrated photonics bet that drives PsiQuantum’s million-qubit ambition and the silicon-photonics fabs the field relies on. QuiX is selling the tools for that build-out.