A tweezer array with 6,100 highly coherent atomic qubits
Creators
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1.
California Institute of Technology
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2.
Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics
Abstract
Optical tweezer arrays have transformed atomic and molecular physics, now forming the backbone for a range of leading experiments in quantum computing, simulation and metrology. Typical experiments trap tens to hundreds of atomic qubits and, recently, systems with around 1,000 atoms were realized without defining qubits or demonstrating coherent control. However, scaling to thousands of atomic qubits with long coherence times and low-loss and high-fidelity imaging is an outstanding challenge and critical for progress in quantum science, particularly towards quantum error correction (QEC). Here we experimentally realize an array of optical tweezers trapping more than 6,100 neutral atoms in around 12,000 sites, simultaneously surpassing state-of-the-art performance for several metrics that underpin the success of the platform. Specifically, while scaling to such a large number of atoms, we demonstrate a coherence time of 12.6(1) s, a record for hyperfine qubits in an optical tweezer array. We show room-temperature trapping lifetimes of about 23 min, enabling record-high imaging survival of 99.98952(1)% with an imaging fidelity of more than 99.99%. We present a plan for zone-based quantum computing and demonstrate necessary coherence-preserving qubit transport and pick-up/drop-off operations on large spatial scales, characterized through interleaved randomized benchmarking. Our results, along with recent developments, indicate that universal quantum computing and QEC with thousands to tens of thousands of physical qubits could be a near-term prospect.
Copyright and License
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Acknowledgement
We acknowledge insightful discussions with, and feedback from, A. Shaw, H. Levine, R. Tsai, N. Meister, Z. Li, R. Finkelstein, P. Scholl, J. Choi, D. Bluvstein and S. Choi. We acknowledge support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (grant GBMF11562), the Weston Havens Foundation, the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, an NSF Physics Frontiers Center (NSF grant PHY-2317110), the NSF QLCI programme (2016245), the NSF CAREER award (1753386), the Army Research Office MURI programme (W911NF2010136), the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-SC0021951), the DARPA ONISQ programme (W911NF2010021), the Air Force Office for Scientific Research Young Investigator Program (FA9550-19-1-0044) and the Heising-Simons Foundation (2024-4852). Support is also acknowledged from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, Quantum Systems Accelerator. H.J.M. acknowledges support from the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant no. 2139433. K.H.L. acknowledges support from the AWS Quantum postdoctoral fellowship and the NUS Development Grant AY2023/2024.
Conflict of Interest
The authors have filed a patent application (U.S. Patent Application 19/083,149) related to the methods described in this work.
Data Availability
The data supporting the main findings of this study are available in the CaltechDATA repository98. Further data are available from the corresponding authors on request.
Code Availability
The codes supporting the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors on request.
Supplemental Material
Supplementary Information, including Supplementary Figs. 1–6, Supplementary Table 1 and Supplementary References.
Additional Information
Extended Data Fig. 1 Experiment apparatus and sequence.
Extended Data Fig. 2 Tweezer uniformity details.
Extended Data Fig. 3 Tweezer spacing details.
Extended Data Fig. 4 Imaging characterization.
Extended Data Fig. 5 Imaging survival details.
Extended Data Fig. 6 Imaging in 20 ms.
Extended Data Fig. 7 Characteristics of microwave-driven qubits.
Extended Data Fig. 8 Site-resolved coherence metrics.
Extended Data Fig. 9 Raman sideband spectroscopy.
Extended Data Fig. 10 Long-distance AOD movement and large-scale AOD–SLM trap transfer.
Files
s41586-025-09641-4.pdf
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Additional details
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1038/s41586-025-09641-4
- PMID
- 40992401
- PMCID
- PMC12589140
Funding
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- GBMF11562
- Weston Havens Foundation
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2317110
- National Science Foundation
- 2016245
- National Science Foundation
- 1753386
- United States Army Research Office
- W911NF2010136
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-SC0021951
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- W911NF2010021
- United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- FA9550-19-1-0044
- Heising-Simons Foundation
- 2024-4852
- National Science Foundation
- DGE-2139433
- Amazon (United States)
- National University of Singapore
- AY2023/2024
Dates
- Submitted
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2024-03-20
- Accepted
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2025-09-17
- Available
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2025-09-24
- Available
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2025-10-29Version of record