Abstract
The manipulation of neutral atoms by light is at the heart of countless scientific discoveries in the field of quantum physics in the last three decades. The level of control that has been achieved at the single particle level within arrays of optical traps, while preserving the fundamental properties of quantum matter (coherence, entanglement, superposition), makes these technologies prime candidates to implement disruptive computation paradigms. In this paper, we review the main characteristics of these devices from atoms / qubits to application interfaces, and propose a classification of a wide variety of tasks that can already be addressed in a computationally efficient manner in the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum\cite{Preskill_NISQ} era we are in. We illustrate how applications ranging from optimization challenges to simulation of quantum systems can be explored either at the digital level (programming gate-based circuits) or at the analog level (programming Hamiltonian sequences). We give evidence of the intrinsic scalability of neutral atom quantum processors in the 100-1,000 qubits range and introduce prospects for universal fault tolerant quantum computing and applications beyond quantum computing.
Highlights
One promising solution to the shortcomings of classical computing systems consists in the utilization of specialized accelerators for dedicated purposes
Unlike classical information carried by digital bits 0 or 1, quantum information is commonly encoded onto a collection of two-level quantum systems referred to as qubits
Neutral atom platforms for quantum processing have a unique potential for scalability: the size of the quantum register is only limited by the amount of trapping laser power and by the performance of the optical system generating the optical tweezers
Summary
One promising solution to the shortcomings of classical computing systems consists in the utilization of specialized accelerators for dedicated purposes. Shor’s algorithm runs in a time increasing as a polynomial of log N , whereas the best classical algorithm for this tasks requires sub-exponential time In such quantum algorithms, computation is described as a sequential application of quantum logic gates onto the qubits. The actual implementation of these quantum algorithms is still years away, as they would require ideal digital quantum processors, active research is currently exploring the capabilities of currently available quantum devices, which are imperfect and comprise a relatively modest number of qubits These devices have recently shown that their computing capabilities can outperform classical supercomputers for a specific computing task [2].
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