Abstract
Since the first observation 20 years ago of first coherent quantum behaviour in a superconducting qubit there have been significant developments in the field of superconducting quantum circuits. With improvements of coherence times by over 5 orders of magnitude, it is now possible to execute increasingly complex quantum algorithms with these circuits. Despite these successes, the coherence time of superconducting devices must still be increased for quantum computation to become a reality. One approach is to improve existing devices. Another approach is to design new superconducting qubits with intrinsic protection against certain types of errors. In this talk, I will discuss how quantum information can be robustly encoded in cat states of the electromagnetic field stored in superconducting quantum devices. A feature of this encoding is that it exhibits biased noise. I will present how to realize bias-preserving gates on this qubit, and how these ideas can be further improved with quantum error correction.