Details
- Pasqal announced what it says is a world-first demonstration of trapping individual atoms with laser light generated by a photonic integrated circuit.
- The work was done with Aeponyx, the photonics subsidiary Pasqal acquired less than 18 months ago, and involved four optical traps holding four rubidium atoms.
- The company says the on-chip approach reproduces trapping performance similar to its bulk-optics systems, including atom lifetimes of about 27.5 seconds.
- Pasqal says the new architecture is intended to reduce the optical footprint of future neutral-atom processors by as much as 50 times and support scaling toward more than 10,000 atoms and 100 logical qubits.
- Pasqal has previously highlighted roadmap milestones including larger physical-qubit systems and logical-qubit development, and says integrated photonics is a key step toward manufacturable fault-tolerant hardware.
Impact
The result matters because optical hardware is one of the main bottlenecks in scaling neutral-atom quantum computers, and moving qubit control onto a chip could simplify future systems. If Pasqal can extend this architecture, it would strengthen the case for integrated photonics as a manufacturing path for larger quantum processors over the next 12 to 24 months.
