Caltech’s huge 6,100-qubit array brings the quantum future nearer

Now, in a step towards this imaginative and prescient, Caltech physicists have created the most important qubit array ever assembled: 6,100 neutral-atom qubits trapped in a grid by lasers. Previous arrays of this type contained solely tons of of qubits.

This milestone comes amid a quickly rising race to scale up quantum computer systems. There are a number of approaches in improvement, together with these based mostly on superconducting circuits, trapped ions, and impartial atoms, as used within the new research.

“This is an exciting moment for neutral-atom quantum computing,” says Manuel Endres, professor of physics at Caltech. “We can now see a pathway to large error-corrected quantum computers. The building blocks are in place.” Endres is the principal investigator of the analysis printed on September 24 in Nature. Three Caltech graduate college students led the research: Hannah Manetsch, Gyohei Nomura, and Elie Bataille.

The staff used optical tweezers — extremely centered laser beams — to lure 1000’s of particular person cesium atoms in a grid. To construct the array of atoms, the researchers cut up a laser beam into 12,000 tweezers, which collectively held 6,100 atoms in a vacuum chamber. “On the screen, we can actually see each qubit as a pinpoint of light,” Manetsch says. “It’s a striking image of quantum hardware at a large scale.”

A key achievement was displaying that this bigger scale didn’t come on the expense of high quality. Even with greater than 6,000 qubits in a single array, the staff stored them in superposition for about 13 seconds — practically 10 instances longer than what was attainable in earlier comparable arrays — whereas manipulating particular person qubits with 99.98 % accuracy. “Large scale, with more atoms, is often thought to come at the expense of accuracy, but our results show that we can do both,” Nomura says. “Qubits aren’t useful without quality. Now we have quantity and quality.”

The staff additionally demonstrated that they might transfer the atoms tons of of micrometers throughout the array whereas sustaining superposition. The means to shuttle qubits is a key function of neutral-atom quantum computer systems that allows extra environment friendly error correction in contrast with conventional, hard-wired platforms like superconducting qubits.

Manetsch compares the duty of shifting the person atoms whereas retaining them in a state of superposition to balancing a glass of water whereas operating. “Trying to hold an atom while moving is like trying to not let the glass of water tip over. Trying to also keep the atom in a state of superposition is like being careful to not run so fast that water splashes over,” she says.

The subsequent massive milestone for the sphere is implementing quantum error correction on the scale of 1000’s of bodily qubits, and this work exhibits that impartial atoms are a powerful candidate to get there. “Quantum computers will have to encode information in a way that’s tolerant to errors, so we can actually do calculations of value,” Bataille says. “Unlike in classical computers, qubits can’t simply be copied due to the so-called no-cloning theorem, so error correction has to rely on more subtle strategies.”

Looking forward, the researchers plan to hyperlink the qubits of their array collectively in a state of entanglement, the place particles turn into correlated and behave as one. Entanglement is a obligatory step for quantum computer systems to maneuver past merely storing data in superposition; entanglement will enable them to start finishing up full quantum computations. It can also be what offers quantum computer systems their final energy — the flexibility to simulate nature itself, the place entanglement shapes the conduct of matter at each scale. The purpose is obvious: to harness entanglement to unlock new scientific discoveries, from revealing new phases of matter to guiding the design of novel supplies and modeling the quantum fields that govern space-time.

“It’s exciting that we are creating machines to help us learn about the universe in ways that only quantum mechanics can teach us,” Manetsch says.

The new research, “A tweezer array with 6100 highly coherent atomic qubits,” was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Weston Havens Foundation, the National Science Foundation through its Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM) at Caltech, the Army Research Office, the U.S. Department of Energy together with its Quantum Systems Accelerator, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Air Force Office for Scientific Research, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and the AWS Quantum Postdoctoral Fellowship. Other authors embrace Caltech’s Kon H. Leung, the AWS Quantum senior postdoctoral scholar analysis affiliate in physics, in addition to former Caltech postdoctoral scholar Xudong Lv, now on the Chinese Academy of Sciences.