2024: Atomically Perfect Array Sets New Record

Scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China, led by Jianwei Pan and Chaoyang Lu, have collaborated with researchers from the Shanghai Center for Quantum Science and the Shanghai AI Lab, including Hanxin Zhong, to construct the largest-scale atomic quantum computing system to date. By leveraging artificial intelligence, the team achieved high parallelism and constant-time computational complexity independent of array size, successfully creating defect-free two-dimensional and three-dimensional atomic arrays containing up to 2,024 neutral atoms in just 60 milliseconds—setting a new world record for defect-free neutral atom arrays. This breakthrough establishes a critical technological foundation for large-scale neutral atom-based quantum computing. Neutral atom systems are considered one of the most promising platforms for quantum computing and quantum simulation due to their excellent scalability, high-fidelity quantum gates, strong parallelism, and arbitrary connectivity. These systems use optical tweezers to trap neutral atoms, but first require a reconfiguration process to transform an initially randomly filled array into a defect-free one before performing quantum logic operations. Traditional reconfiguration methods face significant challenges, including rapidly increasing time complexity with array size, atom loss, and slow processing speeds, limiting array scales to just a few hundred atoms and hindering further expansion. To overcome these limitations, the research team developed a novel AI-driven approach that uses real-time control of high-speed spatial light modulators. By precisely manipulating the positions and phases of optical tweezers, the system can simultaneously move all atoms in the array. In this work, the team demonstrated arbitrary reconfiguration of both two-dimensional and three-dimensional atomic arrays, achieving defect-free arrangements of 2,024 atoms with a total reconfiguration time of only 60 milliseconds. Crucially, the computational time remains constant regardless of array size, making the method directly scalable to arrays with tens of thousands of atoms in the future. The system achieved a single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.97%, a two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.5%, and a detection fidelity of 99.92%—matching the highest levels reported internationally. These results lay a solid technical foundation for building fault-tolerant, universal quantum computers based on neutral atom arrays. The findings were published on August 9 as an “Editor’s Suggestion” in Physical Review Letters (PRL) and highlighted by the American Physical Society’s Physics journal as a significant research advance. Reviewers praised the work, calling it a “new record in assembling 2,024 atoms,” and describing it as a “major leap forward in computational efficiency and experimental feasibility” in the field of atomic quantum physics. The research was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Anhui Provincial Government, and the Shanghai Municipal Government.