Neutral atom arrays manipulated with optical tweezers are promising candidates for fault tolerant quantum computers due to their advantageous properties, such as scalability, long coherence times, and optical accessibility for communication. A significant challenge to overcome is the presence of non-Pauli errors, specifically erasure errors and leakage errors. Previous work has shown that leakage errors can be converted into erasure errors; however, these (converted) erasure errors continuously occur and accumulate over time. Prior proposals have involved transporting atoms directly from a reservoir area—where spare atoms are stored—to the computational area—where computation and error correction are performed—to correct atom loss. While coherent transport is promising, it may not address all challenges—particularly its effectiveness in dense arrays and the efficacy of alternative methods should be investigated. In this study, we evaluate the effects of erasure errors on the surface code using circuit-based Monte Carlo simulations that incorporate depolarizing and accumulated erasure errors. We propose a new scheme to mitigate this problem: a k-shift erasure recovery scheme. Our scheme employs code deformation to repeatedly transfer the logical qubit from an imperfect array with accumulated erased qubits to a perfect array, thereby tolerating many accumulated erasures. Furthermore, our scheme corrects erasure errors in the atom arrays while the logical qubits are evacuated from the area being corrected; thus, manipulating optical tweezers for erasure correction does not disturb the qubits that constitute the logical data. Our scheme provides a practical pathway for neutral atom quantum computers to achieve feasible fault tolerance.
Neutral atom arrays manipulated with optical tweezers are promising candidates for fault tolerant quantum computers due to their advantageous properties, such as scalability, long coherence times, and optical accessibility for communication. A significant challenge to overcome is the presence of non-Pauli errors, specifically erasure errors and leakage errors. Previous work has shown that leakage errors can be converted into erasure errors; however, these (converted) erasure errors continuously occur and accumulate over time. Prior proposals have involved transporting atoms directly from a reservoir area—where spare atoms are stored—to the computational area—where computation and error correction are performed—to correct atom loss. While coherent transport is promising, it may not address all challenges—particularly its effectiveness in dense arrays and the efficacy of alternative methods should be investigated. In this study, we evaluate the effects of erasure errors on the surface code using circuit-based Monte Carlo simulations that incorporate depolarizing and accumulated erasure errors. We propose a new scheme to mitigate this problem: a k-shift erasure recovery scheme. Our scheme employs code deformation to repeatedly transfer the logical qubit from an imperfect array with accumulated erased qubits to a perfect array, thereby tolerating many accumulated erasures. Furthermore, our scheme corrects erasure errors in the atom arrays while the logical qubits are evacuated from the area being corrected; thus, manipulating optical tweezers for erasure correction does not disturb the qubits that constitute the logical data. Our scheme provides a practical pathway for neutral atom quantum computers to achieve feasible fault tolerance.
Neutral-atom arrays are a leading qubit technology for large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC). A dominant error source on this platform is qubit loss, which accrues with every operation and movement. The presence of loss undermines the promises of existing architectural work. Standard error correction targets stochastic Pauli errors and cannot correct loss, so most FTQC performance analyses are not directly compatible with it. Moreover, compilation and routing decisions, which strongly affect overall loss, are typically optimized against Pauli-error cost models and often remain loss-agnostic, potentially increasing exposure to the loss channel.
In this work, we comprehensively model the effect of qubit loss on neutral-atom FTQC and develop a loss-tolerant transversal-gate architecture. We treat loss not as a predetermined error parameter but as a dynamic budget spent across a whole program, allowing us to control it by co-designing layout, compilation, and decoding. We target a physical implementation with no separate storage and entangling zones, eliminating the repeated SLM-AOD handoffs and long-distance shuttling that dominate loss in other layouts. We develop compiler optimizations that maximize gate parallelism while respecting the RF tone budget and AOD bandwidth constraints. Our work couples these with a loss-aware, delayed-erasure decoder and an end-to-end loss-aware magic state cultivation protocol. Overall, we improve accumulated loss per syndrome-extraction round by up to 2.15X against a zoned baseline and reduce logical error rates by over two orders of magnitude versus current architectures. Our framework also informs concrete device targets such as continuous reloading rates, AOD counts, and shuttling trajectory choices. We expect these insights to matter for system architects as neutral-atom hardware scales.
Abstract Executing quantum algorithms on error-corrected logical qubits is a critical step for scalable quantum computing, but the requisite numbers of qubits and physical error rates are demanding for current experimental hardware. Recently, the development of error correcting codes tailored to particular physical noise models has helped relax these requirements. In this work, we propose a qubit encoding and gate protocol for 171 Yb neutral atom qubits that converts the dominant physical errors into erasures, that is, errors in known locations. The key idea is to encode qubits in a metastable electronic level, such that gate errors predominantly result in transitions to disjoint subspaces whose populations can be continuously monitored via fluorescence. We estimate that 98% of errors can be converted into erasures. We quantify the benefit of this approach via circuit-level simulations of the surface code, finding a threshold increase from 0.937% to 4.15%. We also observe a larger code distance near the threshold, leading to a faster decrease in the logical error rate for the same number of physical qubits, which is important for near-term implementations. Erasure conversion should benefit any error correcting code, and may also be applied to design new gates and encodings in other qubit platforms.
Neutral atom quantum computing utilizes laser-trapped neutral atoms as qubits and realizes quantum logic gate operations through Rydberg-state interactions. In recent years, it has become one of the most vibrant directions in quantum computing hardware. This paper systematically reviews the working principles of neutral-atom quantum computers, including qubit encoding, atom trapping and manipulation, Rydberg states and interactions, the Rydberg blockade quantum gate mechanism, and atom rearrangement with reconfigurable architectures. The mainstream technical routes are surveyed, represented by optical tweezer arrays combined with Rydberg interactions, optical lattice schemes, and dipole trap arrays. A panoramic review is provided of domestic and international research progress from theoretical foundations in 2000 to the latest achievements in 2026, including thousand-qubit-scale systems, logical qubits, and quantum error correction experiments. Key breakthroughs are highlighted, such as the 6100-atom qubit array, continuous operation of a 3000-qubit system, quantum simulation of the Kitaev honeycomb model, toric code error correction demonstrations, encoding rates exceeding 1/2, and fault-tolerant architectures. The core bottlenecks are analyzed in depth, including the scalability--fidelity trade-off, engineering implementation of quantum error correction, atom loss and mid-circuit replenishment, laser system industrialization, control electronics scalability, and long-distance quantum interconnection. This paper aims to provide a systematic reference for academic research and technological development in this field.
The requirements for fault-tolerant quantum error correction can be simplified by leveraging structure in the noise of the underlying hardware.In this work, we identify a new type of structured noise motivated by neutral-atom qubits, biased erasure errors, which arises when qubit errors are dominated by detectable leakage from only one of the computational states of the qubit.We study the performance of this model using gate-level simulations of the XZZX surface code.Using the predicted erasure fraction and bias of metastable 171 Yb qubits, we find a threshold of 8.2% for two-qubit gate errors, which is 1.9 times higher than the threshold for unbiased erasures and 7.5 times higher than the threshold for depolarizing errors.Surprisingly, the improved threshold is achieved without bias-preserving controlled-NOT gates and, instead, results from the lower noise entropy in this model.We also introduce an XZZX cluster state construction for measurement-based error correction, hybrid fusion, that is optimized for this noise model.By combining fusion operations and deterministic entangling gates, this construction preserves the intrinsic symmetry of the XZZX code, leading to a higher threshold of 10.3% and enabling the use of rectangular codes with fewer qubits.We discuss a potential physical implementation using a single plane of atoms and movable tweezers.
Polar molecules trapped in optical tweezer arrays offer a promising platform for quantum information processing, providing precise control and long-range interactions that enable high-fidelity gate operations. We investigate quantum error correction in this system and show the influence of underlying physical noise. A mapping is constructed from a molecular tweezer array onto a rotated surface code in which a single specification of the array, namely, which code qubits share a molecule and where those molecules are located, determines both the correlated erasure structure and the dipolar exchange graph. We compare molecular encodings with rotational qudit dimensions (D), two and four under heralded molecular loss, coherent dipolar exchange, and imperfect heralding. It is found that a D= 4 encoding with spatially dispersed pairing exhibits a finite distance crossing at approximately the same per molecule loss rate as D= 2, while using 48-49 % fewer molecules, at the cost of a 6-10 % increase in sub-threshold logical error. Fixing the encoding and varying only the spatial embedding produces substantially larger effects: pairing the two co-located qubits along a lattice direction yields a logical-sector asymmetry of approximately fifty times. Over the simulated distances (d = 5, 7, 9), the disfavoured sector shows little or no suppression of logical error with increasing code distance, whereas the favoured sector improves by a factor of 1.5-2.3. We also find that Pauli twirl of the exchange interaction overestimates the logical error rate, which we attribute to the excitation-conserving structure of the interaction. These results reveal that the spatial embedding of correlated loss units is an important design parameter for molecular architectures and that single-sector benchmarks may be insufficient when correlated loss has directional structure.
Efficient quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computing require scalable, high-fidelity long-range connectivity. In neutral-atom quantum computers, this is commonly achieved through atom transport, but shuttling introduces latency and motional heating that worsen with system size. Here, we introduce a neutral-atom architecture based on static atomic buses, in which auxiliary mediator atoms enable long-range entangling operations without qubit transport. The architecture naturally supports long-range stabilizer measurements in high-rate LDPC codes and transversal logical gates between neighboring surface-code patches, enabling a modular framework for efficient logical memories, Clifford computation, and magic-state distillation. To realize these capabilities, we co-design optimal-control protocols for bus-mediated controlled-Z gates that incorporate both microscopic neutral-atom dynamics and architectural constraints. We obtain smooth bus-mediated gates with fidelities approaching 99.9% and durations of a few hundred nanoseconds by combining time-optimal control with interaction-flatness and robustness constraints. Large-scale simulations of quantum error correction and logical entangling operations between neighboring surface-code patches predict more than an order-of-magnitude improvement in logical error rates compared with atom-shuttling architectures under realistic noise. The architecture achieves logical gate times of approximately 100 us and quantum-error-correction cycle times of about 1 ms for code distances d<12. These results establish static atomic buses as a practical alternative to atom shuttling for scalable fault-tolerant neutral-atom quantum computing.