Fault-tolerant, universal quantum processing with neutral atoms
Madelyn Cain
California Institute of Technology
Quantum computers offer a new paradigm for scientific discovery, but their practical realization is fundamentally limited by decoherence. Quantum error correction (QEC) provides a route to overcome this challenge by encoding protected logical qubits into many redundant physical qubits. However, efficiently encoding, manipulating, and scaling such logical qubits in realistic hardware remains a central open problem.
In this talk, I will describe experimental explorations of the key building blocks of universal, fault-tolerant quantum processing with reconfigurable arrays of neutral atoms, and probe their underlying working mechanisms. I will present observations of below-threshold logical performance, efficient logical entanglement via transversal gates and lattice surgery, and universal operations enabled by transversal teleportation between two- and three-dimensional codes. Finally, I will discuss theoretical findings enabling time-efficient computation with transversal gates and magic-state inputs, which reduce the overhead of fault tolerance by more than an order of magnitude while admitting accurate and fast decoding. Together, these results establish foundations for practical, universal quantum processing in neutral-atom systems.