{"id":416779,"date":"2026-01-18T05:28:15","date_gmt":"2026-01-18T05:28:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/416779\/"},"modified":"2026-01-18T05:28:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T05:28:15","slug":"physicists-outline-technique-to-scale-neutral-atom-quantum-systems-beyond-100000-qubits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/416779\/","title":{"rendered":"Physicists Outline Technique to Scale Neutral-Atom Quantum Systems Beyond 100,000 Qubits"},"content":{"rendered":"

Insider Brief<\/p>\n

Researchers at Columbia University report a metasurface-based optical tweezer platform that provides a realistic path to scaling neutral-atom quantum systems beyond 100,000 qubits.<\/p>\n

In a paper published in Nature, the team demonstrates trapping 1,000 strontium atoms and shows designs capable of generating more than 360,000 optical tweezers, far exceeding current array-generation methods.<\/p>\n

The approach replaces bulky beam-shaping hardware with nanofabricated metasurfaces that can handle high laser power, enabling much larger, denser atom arrays limited primarily by available laser power rather than optical complexity.<\/p>\n

Image: Illustration of a neutral-atom array. (Will Lab, Columbia University)<\/p>\n

PRESS RELEASE \u2014 For quantum computers to outperform their classical counterparts, they need more quantum bits, or qubits. State-of-the-art quantum computers have around 1,000 qubits. Columbia physicists\u00a0Sebastian Will<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Nanfang Yu<\/a>\u00a0have their sights set much higher.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are laying critical groundwork to enable quantum computers with more than 100,000 qubits,\u201d Will said. In a new paper published today in\u00a0Nature<\/a>, Will and Yu combine two powerful technologies\u2014optical tweezers and metasurfaces\u2014to dramatically scale the size of neutral-atom arrays.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Neutral-atom arrays are a rapidly emerging platform to create quantum computers. In a foundational study led by graduate students Aaron Holman and Yuan Xu from the Will and Yu labs, respectively, the team successfully trapped 1,000 strontium atoms and demonstrated that their approach can scale to well above 100,000.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Responsive<\/a><\/p>\n

These atoms could one day serve as qubits in a quantum computer, a task for which atoms are well-suited. Atoms offer a powerful way to engineer the quantum properties that quantum computers need, like superposition and entanglement. Each atom is also identical, so there\u2019s no need to spend time characterizing and synchronizing them\u2014a daunting task for fabricated forms of qubits, especially as the number grows.<\/p>\n

\u201cAtoms are nature\u2019s own qubits; perfectly identical and massively abundant. The bottleneck has always been finding a way to control them at scale,\u201d said Holman.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For about a decade, researchers have been trapping atoms with what are known as optical tweezer arrays. In essence, a single \u201coptical tweezer\u201d is a tightly focused laser beam that holds an individual atom at its focal point. Tweezer arrays are made up of many individual tweezers, typically generated via spatial light modulators (SLMs) or acousto-optic deflectors (AODs). Using these techniques, a team at\u00a0Caltech recently achieved arrays with 6,100 trapped atoms<\/a>\u00a0and demonstrated that they can successfully function as qubits. \u201cTheir report is an amazing achievement,\u201d said Will. \u201cWith our metasurface tweezer array approach, we hope to scale neutral-atom arrays even further, perhaps even beyond 100,000 atoms.\u201d<\/p>\n

This scaling comes from a fundamentally new approach to generating optical tweezer arrays: metasurfaces. Metasurfaces are flat optical devices comprising a two-dimensional array of nanometer-sized \u201cpixels.\u201d When a single beam of light passes through a metasurface, it is shaped by the pixels into a unique pattern. In the current work, the pixels are much smaller than the wavelength of the light they are manipulating: less than 200 nm, compared to the 520-nm light used for the tweezers. That means they can directly generate a tweezer array; SLM and AOD approaches require additional equipment that is bulky, expensive, and limits the ultimate size of the array.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe metasurfaces used in this work can be considered a superposition of tens of thousands of flat lenses over the same plane and differing in their focal spot location,\u201d said Yu, \u201cso that upon the incidence of a laser beam, one metasurface can simultaneously produce tens of thousands of focal spots.\u201d<\/p>\n

The metasurfaces, made from silicon nitride and titanium dioxide, can also tolerate extremely powerful lasers with optical intensities of more than 2000 W\/mm2\u2014that\u2019s about a million times more intense than sunlight as it reaches Earth. \u201cThe high-power handling capability of metasurfaces coupled with the scalability of cleanroom nanofabrication of ever larger and more precise devices makes our platform uniquely capable of realizing massively scalable optical tweezer arrays,\u201d said Xu.<\/p>\n

For the paper, the team demonstrated the versatility of the metasurface optical tweezer platform by trapping atoms into a number of highly uniform 2D arrays. The patterns include a square lattice with 1024 sites; quasicrystal and Statue of Liberty patterns with hundreds of sites; and a circle made up of atoms spaced just under 1.5 microns apart.<\/p>\n

The team also created a 3.5-mm diameter metasurface containing more than 100 million pixels that generates a 600 x 600 array: that\u2019s 360,000 optical tweezers in total, which is two orders of magnitude beyond the capabilities of current technologies.<\/p>\n

Will and Yu see a realistic path to scalability for neutral-atom arrays, which may not only benefit quantum computers but also other neutral-atom quantum technologies, like quantum simulators, which help scientists model complex quantum many-body phenomena, and precise optical atomic clocks that could be deployed outside of laboratories.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next? The team is ready to take on more atoms. To do so, they just need a bigger laser. \u201cTo trap a hundred thousand atoms, we\u2019ll need a much more powerful laser than we currently have,\u201d said Will. \u201cBut, it\u2019s in a realistic range.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Insider Brief Researchers at Columbia University report a metasurface-based optical tweezer platform that provides a realistic path to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":416780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[49,48,8760,99090,87078,314,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-416779","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-columbia-university","11":"tag-neutral-atom","12":"tag-optical-tweezers","13":"tag-physics","14":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/416780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}