An experiment on high-speed atom rearrangement for neutral-atom quantum computation, conducted by Pan Jianwei and Lu Chaoyang from the University of Science and Technology of China, together with Zhong Hansen from Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and other colleagues, was listed among the top nine advances in 2025 in physics announced by the American Physical Society (APS) on December 15.

Neutral atom arrays have recently emerged as a promising platform for quantum computation and simulation, featuring excellent scalability, high gate fidelity, high parallelism and all-to-all connectivity. Researchers first need to convert a randomly filled atomic array into a defect-free atomic array. However, traditional methods, which have so far been limited to small-scale arrays, are constrained by time complexity with respect to the atom size, as well as atom loss and slow computation speed.

In this study, the research team developed an atom-based quantum computing system that achieves high parallelism and a constant time overhead. They successfully assembled defect-free 2D and 3D atom arrays with up to 2024 atoms at a constant-time cost of 60 ms, which were the largest defect-free atom arrays at that time.

According to physics, researchers used 549 atoms as movable pixels and created an animation depicting the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, showing rubidium atoms being moved and rearranged at record speed by a newly developed AI model within optical-tweezer-trapped atom arrays to form different images. The innovative demonstration not only became the most viewed content on the physics website in 2025, but also highlighted the essential role of high-speed atom rearrangement in future atom-based quantum computers.

Paper Link:https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/2ym8-vs82

(Written by MA Hanyue, USTC News Center)