Curator's Take
This research tackles one of the most critical engineering challenges in neutral atom quantum computing: how to quickly and accurately move qubits between different locations without destroying their delicate quantum states. The team achieved remarkably fast 10-microsecond transfers with heating rates 10-100 times lower than previous demonstrations, while maintaining near-perfect fidelity over hundreds of cycles - a breakthrough that directly addresses the speed and error accumulation bottlenecks that have limited scalable quantum circuits. Their fiber array architecture with site-resolved trap control represents a major step toward practical quantum computers that can dynamically reconfigure qubit connectivity, enabling more efficient quantum algorithms that don't require every qubit to be physically connected to every other qubit. These results suggest that neutral atom platforms may have found a viable path to compete with superconducting and trapped ion systems in the race toward fault-tolerant quantum computing.
— Mark Eatherly
Summary
Programmable neutral-atom arrays offer a promising route toward scalable quantum computing, where coherent qubit transfer enables non-local connectivity and reduces resource overhead. However, transfer speed and motional heating remain key bottlenecks for fast and deep quantum circuits. Here, we employ a fiber array neutral-atom quantum computing architecture with site-resolved control of trap depths to realize smooth amplitude exchange between static and moving traps, thereby enabling fast and coherent qubit transfer with ultralow motional heating. With a 10 $μ$s in situ transfer between static and moving traps, we obtain a per-cycle heating rate of 0.156(9) $μ$K, sustain over 500 cycles with negligible atom loss, and achieve a quantum state fidelity of 0.99992(5) per cycle. For inter-site transfer between two separated static traps, the operation takes 120 $μ$s with 0.783(17) $μ$K heating per transfer, and remains negligible atom loss for up to 100 repeated cycles with a fidelity of 0.9998(1) per transfer. Furthermore, through experimental studies of parallel transfer, we establish a model that elucidates the relationship between array inhomogeneity and the transfer heating rate. This fast, low-heating coherent transfer capability provides a practical route for improving both speed and fidelity in atom-shuttling based quantum computing.