A research team led by PAN Jianwei and LU Chaoyang from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with ZHONG Hansen from the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and other collaborators, has demonstrated a high-speed atom rearrangement technique that significantly advances neutral-atom quantum computation.

The study was published in Physics Review Letters on August 8.

Neutral atom arrays have recently emerged as a promising platform for quantum computation and simulation, featuring excellent scalability, high gate fidelity, high parallelism and all-to-all connectivity. A critical prerequisite for such systems is the ability to transform a randomly filled atomic array into a defect-free configuration. However, traditional methods, which have so far been limited to small-scale arrays, are constrained by time complexity with respect to the atom size, as well as atom loss and slow computation speed.

To overcome these bottlenecks, the researchers developed an atom-based quantum computing system capable of highly parallel operations with a constant time overhead. Using this approach, they successfully assembled defect-free two-dimensional and three-dimensional atom arrays containing up to 2,024 atoms within a constant time cost of 60 milliseconds. This result sets a new world record for defect-free atom arrays in neutral-atom systems and represents a significant step toward scalable neutral-atom quantum computation.

To further illustrate the capabilities of high-speed atom rearrangement, the researchers used 549 atoms as movable pixels and created an animation depicting the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, showing rubidium atoms being moved and rearranged at record speed by a newly developed AI model within optical-tweezer-trapped atom arrays to form different images.

These capabilities provide a strong technical foundation for the realization of fault-tolerant, universal quantum computers based on neutral-atom arrays.