A tweezer array with 6100 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 one thousand atoms were realized without defining qubits or demonstrating coherent control. However, scaling to thousands of atomic qubits with long coherence times, low-loss, and high-fidelity imaging is an outstanding challenge and critical for progress in quantum science, particularly towards quantum error correction. Here, we experimentally realize an array of optical tweezers trapping over 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) seconds, a record for hyperfine qubits in an optical tweezer array. We show room-temperature trapping lifetimes of ~ 23 minutes, enabling record-high imaging survival of 99.98952(1)% with an imaging fidelity of over 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 quantum error correction with thousands to tens of thousands of physical qubits could be a near-term prospect.
Copyright and License
© 2025, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
Acknowledgement
We acknowledge insightful discussions with, and feedback from, Adam Shaw, Harry Levine, Richard Tsai, Nadine Meister, Zunqi Li, Ran Finkelstein, Pascal Scholl, Joonhee Choi, Dolev Bluvstein, and Soonwon 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 program (2016245), the NSF CAREER award (1753386), the Army Research Office
MURI program (W911NF2010136), the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-SC0021951), the DARPA ONISQ program (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.
Supplemental Material
Supplementary Information, including Supplementary Figures 1–6, Supplementary Table 1, and Supplementary References.
Additional details
Related works
- Describes
- Journal Article: https://rdcu.be/eI3vp (ReadCube)
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2403.12021 (arXiv)
- Is supplemented by
- Supplemental Material: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-025-09641-4/MediaObjects/41586_2025_9641_MOESM1_ESM.pdf (URL)
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
- Accepted
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2025-09-17