Logical quantum processor based on reconfigurable atom arrays (opens in new tab)

I came to see if this had been posted given I hadn't seen it. Surprised this didn't get more attention, it's a very impressive result – and not just because it involved arrays of entangled qubits flying around each other. I watched Mikhail Lukin present this result at a Berkeley EECS seminar earlier this week. It's very compelling work and, as someone with one foot in the QIS field, I've been thinking about it quite a bit. A few observations for any future finders of this post:

- Neutral atoms, while always compelling, are now strongly in the running for state-of-the-art qubit technologies and may well have a durable superiority to other qubits (e.g. ion traps, superconducting, spin qubits, photonics). The photonics used for quantum control appear to have very powerful advantages over physical wire-based control common to spin and superconducting qubits in particular.

- The past few years, since 2019 really, have been incredibly exciting on the experimental side of the field (not that the TCS hasn't been exciting too – quite the contrary). Still, for me, this result and its timing is among the most surprising in this 4 year period. I don't I"m unique in this and I suspect that if you'd asked most folks in the QIS field on December 5th when we'd have a FTQC that can do something a classical HPC can't – even if not practical – they likely would have said somewhere between 5-15 years. Now, the path towards truly practical FTQC is clear and, with the accelerating progress, we'll likely see meaningful scientific advances due to QC technologies by the end of this decade, likely earlier.

- QC is, in many ways, a trailing technology to AI and quite exotic. While the use cases are different, the fact of the matter is that the advances in AI methods, and LLMs in particular, threaten to eat QC's lunch in many areas of scientific computing. Further, there are properties of quantum information that challenge many potential applications (e.g. no cloning theorem). In my mind, this is the greatest risk to QC technologies not gaining wide spread adoption across many STEM over the next 20 years.

- Even though QC may be practically challenged relative to AI, it is nonetheless (and likely will be for many decades to come) an incredibly verdant technological foundation for algorithm development, condensed matter physics, cosmology, etc. The quantum information paradigm is very different than the classical information; those differences provide a powerful lens to help us understand our world and universe.

Altogether, the future looks bright.