QCA (Quantum Control Architecture) is a fail-closed architecture for observing, gating, and governing quantum control information — advisory detection and awareness, not a production controller, and not affiliated with or endorsed by IBM.
The demonstrated floor today is the Quantum Control Kernel (QCK): precursor / drift-anomaly detection on cryogenic control telemetry. TRL-4 in simulation and against public IBM Heron read-only calibration data. Self-verifiable.
Proven floor. Coupling in motion. Architecture as destination.
Each rung carries its own honest evidence bar. Nothing on this page claims the rung above it.
Fail-closed estimator on control and calibration telemetry. Precursor detection of systematic bias drift. The numbers and events below.
● Demonstrated — TRL-4, published boundsNon-perturbative observe + QCK + fail-closed gates + loop supervisor on live or partner-authorised feeds. Optional one instrumentation experiment. Success criteria fixed before the run.
● Couple target — in motion, not claimed doneComplete fail-closed product architecture: coherent runtime, equilibrium, provenance memory, lifecycle — plus measurement and integrity planes.
● Architecture — compile-ready geometry, not live middlewareThe same governed detector: controlled adversary in simulation, then read-only check on public hardware calibration data we did not generate.
30 seeds × 7 sensor-environment conditions × 2 modes (collapse + healthy), including a 1/f dephasing spectrum. False positives count only healthy-signal runs reaching INTERDICT; WATCHLIST / HOLD on healthy tracks are not false positives.
Reference run (seed 0): INTERDICT at t = 226 s; saturation (D = 1.0) at t = 238 s — 12 s lead.
On IBM's public 156-qubit Heron calibration history, the observer flagged one real T1 collapse (q126, 88.0 → 19.1 µs, −78%) and stayed silent on all 155 other qubits — zero spurious flags.
Applied read-only to IBM’s published calibration history. Metadata only — no circuits executed, no queue, no cost. One real drift event found in stored history (n=1) — offered for replication, not as a measured false-alarm rate. The statistics live in the simulation; this is the existence proof on public data.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by IBM. Pull the same public telemetry and check the method yourself.
Four regimes. Four responses. Abstain outside competence.
These names are the QCK page’s own behaviour vocabulary for D0 — not a claim that a full product OS is live.
Both gates pass — channel trustworthy. Proceed.
Viable but not truthfully responsive — damp before it propagates.
Responsive but not viable — perturb to re-find truth.
Both gates fail — reset honestly rather than pretend.
Advisory outputs only. The operator owns the response. The observer’s job is to be right about the regime — and silent when it cannot know.
A bounded advisory experiment on a live or partner-authorised feed — not a deployment.
Success criteria are fixed before the run: closed-loop spine on the agreed feed, fail-closed on insufficient evidence, QCK-class behaviour preserved, supervisor catches stiction, evidence pack, no production-controller claim. The partner keeps plant authority throughout.
The destination geometry: measurement and control under one fail-closed law.
Architecture-register verbs only ("designed to"). Thresholds: calibrated per hardware during the coupling window — no universal numeric bound stated. External wording: precursor / drift-anomaly detection — not proven pre-collapse prediction.
A fail-closed company makes fail-closed claims.
Open-access preprints (not peer-reviewed), CC-BY 4.0 where stated. Verify DOIs live at use time.