Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2512.13790

Search Smarter, Not Harder: A Scalable, High-Quality Zoned Neutral Atom Compiler

Yannick Stade, Lukas Burgholzer, Robert Wille

quant-phcs.ETSubmitted Dec 15, 2025• Announced Dec 17, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Zoned neutral atom architectures are emerging as a promising platform for large-scale quantum computing. Their growing scale, however, creates a critical need for efficient and automated compilation solutions. Yet, existing methods fail to scale to the thousands of qubits these devices promise. State-of-the-art compilers, in particular, suffer from immense memory requirements that limit them to small-scale problems. This work proposes a scalable compilation strategy that "searches smarter, not harder". We introduce Iterative Diving Search (IDS), a goal-directed search algorithm that avoids the memory issues of previous methods, and relaxed routing, an optimization to mitigate atom rearrangement overhead. Our evaluation confirms that this approach compiles circuits with thousands of qubits and, in addition, even reduces rearrangement overhead by 28.1% on average. The complete code is publicly available in open-source as part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) at https://github.com/munich-quantum-toolkit/qmap.

DOI
10.1145/3770743.3804136
Comments
7 pages, 8 figures

Related papers

Routing-Aware Placement for Zoned Neutral Atom-based Quantum Computing

Yannick Stade, Wan-Hsuan Lin, Jason Cong +1 more

Quantum computing promises to solve previously intractable problems, with neutral atoms emerging as a promising technology. Zoned neutral atom architectures allow for immense parallelism and higher coherence times by shielding idling atoms from interference with laser beams. However, in addition to hardware, successful quantum computation requires sophisticated software support, particularly compilers that optimize quantum algorithms for hardware execution. In the compilation flow for zoned neutral atom architectures, the effective interplay of the placement and routing stages decides the overhead caused by rearranging the atoms during the quantum computation. Suboptimal placements can lead to unnecessary serialization of the rearrangements in the subsequent routing stage. Despite this, all existing compilers treat placement and routing independently thus far—focusing solely on minimizing travel distances. This work introduces the first routing-aware placement method to address this shortcoming. It groups compatible movements into parallel rearrangement steps to minimize both rearrangement steps and travel distances. The implementation utilizing the A* algorithm reduces the rearrangement time by 17% on average and by 49% in the best case compared to the state-of-the-art. The complete code is publicly available in open-source as part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) at https://github.com/cda-tum/mqt-qmap.

arXiv:2505.22715•Oct 26, 2025•1 citation

Guiding Compiler Optimizations for Neutral Atom Quantum Computers Through Visualizations

Yannick Stade, Robert Wille

The scale of Neutral Atom (NA) quantum computers requires automated compilation tools. Designing the required heuristic methods demands a deep understanding of complex hardware trade-offs, for which visualizations can provide crucial insights. This work introduces NAViz, the first publicly available app to visualize quantum computations on NA devices in real-time. A case study demonstrates how NAViz was instrumental in identifying and resolving inefficiencies in an existing compilation strategy, leading to a new, more performant one. The tool is available as part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) at https://github.com/munich-quantum-toolkit/naviz.

quant-pharXiv:2608.04081•Aug 6, 2026•0 citations

Optimal State Preparation for Logical Arrays on Zoned Neutral Atom Quantum Computers

Yannick Stade, L. Schmid, Lukas Burgholzer +1 more

Quantum computing promises to solve problems previously deemed infeasible. However, high error rates necessitate quantum error correction for practical applications. Seminal experiments with zoned neutral atom architectures have shown remarkable potential for fault-tolerant quantum computing. To fully harness their potential, efficient software solutions are vital. A key aspect of quantum error correction is the initialization of physical qubits representing a logical qubit in a highly entangled state. This process, known as state preparation, is the foundation of most quantum error correction codes and, hence, a crucial step towards fault-tolerant quantum computing. Generating a schedule of target-specific instructions to perform the state preparation is highly complex. First software tools exist but are not suitable for the zoned neutral atom architectures. This work addresses this gap by leveraging the computational power of SMT solvers and generating minimal schedules for the state preparation of logical arrays. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that actively utilizing zones to shield idling qubits consistently results in higher fidelities than solutions disregarding these zones. The complete code is publicly available in open-source as part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) at https://github.com/cdatum/mqt-qmap.

arXiv:2411.09738•Design, Automation, and Test in Europe•Mar 31, 2025•2 citations

An Abstract Model and Efficient Routing for Logical Entangling Gates on Zoned Neutral Atom Architectures

Yannick Stade, L. Schmid, Lukas Burgholzer +1 more

Recent experimental achievements have demonstrated the potential of neutral atom architectures for fault-tolerant quantum computing. These architectures feature the dynamic rearrangement of atoms during computation-enabling nearly arbitrary two-dimensional rearrangements. Additionally, they employ a zoned layout with dedicated regions for entangling, storage, and readout. This architecture requires design automation software that efficiently compiles quantum circuits to this hardware and takes care that atoms are in the right place at the right time. In this paper, we initiate this line of work by providing, (1) an abstract model of the novel architecture and, (2) an efficient solution to the routing problem of entangling gates. By this, we aim to maximize the parallelism of entangling gates and minimize the overhead caused by the routing of atoms between zones. In addition to that, we keep the realm of fault-tolerant quantum computing in mind and consider logical qubit arrays, each of which encodes one logical qubit. We implemented the proposed idea as a tool called NALAC and demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency by showing that it can significantly reduce the routing overhead of logical entangling gates compared to the naive approach. As part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT), NALAC is publicly available as open-source at https://github.com/cda-tum/mqt-qmap.

arXiv:2405.08068•IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)•Sep 15, 2024•14 citations

Reuse-Aware Compilation for Zoned Quantum Architectures Based on Neutral Atoms

Wan-Hsuan Lin, Daniel Bochen Tan, Jason Cong

Quantum computing architectures based on neutral atoms offer large scales and high-fidelity operations. They can be heterogeneous, with different zones for storage, entangling operations, and readout. Zoned architectures improve computation fidelity by shielding idling qubits in storage from side-effect noise, unlike monolithic architectures where all operations occur in a single zone. However, supporting these flexible architectures with efficient compilation remains challenging. In this paper, we propose ZAC, a scalable compiler for zoned architectures. ZAC minimizes data movement overhead between zones with qubit reuse, i.e., keeping them in the entanglement zone if an immediate entangling operation is pending. Other innovations include novel data placement and instruction scheduling strategies in ZAC, a flexible specification of zoned architectures, and an intermediate representation for zoned architectures, ZAIR. Our evaluation shows that zoned architectures equipped with ZAC achieve a 22x improvement in fidelity compared to monolithic architectures. Moreover, ZAC is shown to have a 10% fidelity gap on average compared to the ideal solution. This significant performance enhancement enables more efficient and reliable quantum circuit execution, enabling advancements in quantum algorithms and applications. ZAC is open source at https://github.com/UCLAVAST/ZAC

arXiv:2411.11784•IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)•Mar 1, 2025•10 citations

General circuit mapping algorithm for neutral atom quantum computers

Neven Gentil, Rianne S. Lous, Aida Todri-Sanial

Neutral atom quantum computers (NAQC) are emerging as a promising, scalable quantum computing platform because of their long qubit coherence, flexible qubit arrangement, and multiqubit gate capabilities. However, circuit execution often requires physically moving qubits, making compilation a critical optimization challenge. We propose a circuit independent mathematical framework built on graph-theoretic combinatorial optimization that determines the minimal number of required qubit transfers. This model captures spatial constraints specific to NAQC platforms with zone-limited gate operations and multi-qubit gates. From this framework, we encode the qubit mapping problem as a nonlinear integer program and solve it using a genetic algorithm, enabling trade-offs between minimizing the total traveled distance and the number of parallel transfer operations. Compared to the state-of-the-art scalable compiler for zoned architectures, our approach consistently finds fewer transfers. Depending on the optimization focus, our method produces shorter traveled distances or fewer parallel transfer operations. This work provides both theoretical guaranties and a practical tool for efficient, architecture-aware quantum circuit compilation. As a result, practitioners can generate hardware-aware mappings that reduce movement-induced errors and better exploit atom transfer parallelism, directly improving execution efficiency on NAQC devices.

quant-pharXiv:2606.20503•Jun 19, 2026•0 citations
Zoned neutral atom architectures are emerging as a promising platform for large-scale quantum computing. Their growing scale, however, creates a critical need for efficient and automated compilation solutions. Yet, existing methods fail to scale to the thousands of qubits these devices promise. State-of-the-art compilers, in particular, suffer from immense memory requirements that limit them to small-scale problems. This work proposes a scalable compilation strategy that "searches smarter, not harder". We introduce Iterative Diving Search (IDS), a goal-directed search algorithm that avoids the memory issues of previous methods, and relaxed routing, an optimization to mitigate atom rearrangement overhead. Our evaluation confirms that this approach compiles circuits with thousands of qubits and, in addition, even reduces rearrangement overhead by 28.1% on average. The complete code is publicly available in open-source as part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) at https://github.com/munich-quantum-toolkit/qmap.
Quantum computing promises to solve previously intractable problems, with neutral atoms emerging as a promising technology. Zoned neutral atom architectures allow for immense parallelism and higher coherence times by shielding idling atoms from interference with laser beams. However, in addition to hardware, successful quantum computation requires sophisticated software support, particularly compilers that optimize quantum algorithms for hardware execution. In the compilation flow for zoned neutral atom architectures, the effective interplay of the placement and routing stages decides the overhead caused by rearranging the atoms during the quantum computation. Suboptimal placements can lead to unnecessary serialization of the rearrangements in the subsequent routing stage. Despite this, all existing compilers treat placement and routing independently thus far—focusing solely on minimizing travel distances. This work introduces the first routing-aware placement method to address this shortcoming. It groups compatible movements into parallel rearrangement steps to minimize both rearrangement steps and travel distances. The implementation utilizing the A* algorithm reduces the rearrangement time by 17% on average and by 49% in the best case compared to the state-of-the-art. The complete code is publicly available in open-source as part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) at https://github.com/cda-tum/mqt-qmap.
The scale of Neutral Atom (NA) quantum computers requires automated compilation tools. Designing the required heuristic methods demands a deep understanding of complex hardware trade-offs, for which visualizations can provide crucial insights. This work introduces NAViz, the first publicly available app to visualize quantum computations on NA devices in real-time. A case study demonstrates how NAViz was instrumental in identifying and resolving inefficiencies in an existing compilation strategy, leading to a new, more performant one. The tool is available as part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) at https://github.com/munich-quantum-toolkit/naviz.
Quantum computing promises to solve problems previously deemed infeasible. However, high error rates necessitate quantum error correction for practical applications. Seminal experiments with zoned neutral atom architectures have shown remarkable potential for fault-tolerant quantum computing. To fully harness their potential, efficient software solutions are vital. A key aspect of quantum error correction is the initialization of physical qubits representing a logical qubit in a highly entangled state. This process, known as state preparation, is the foundation of most quantum error correction codes and, hence, a crucial step towards fault-tolerant quantum computing. Generating a schedule of target-specific instructions to perform the state preparation is highly complex. First software tools exist but are not suitable for the zoned neutral atom architectures. This work addresses this gap by leveraging the computational power of SMT solvers and generating minimal schedules for the state preparation of logical arrays. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that actively utilizing zones to shield idling qubits consistently results in higher fidelities than solutions disregarding these zones. The complete code is publicly available in open-source as part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) at https://github.com/cdatum/mqt-qmap.
Recent experimental achievements have demonstrated the potential of neutral atom architectures for fault-tolerant quantum computing. These architectures feature the dynamic rearrangement of atoms during computation-enabling nearly arbitrary two-dimensional rearrangements. Additionally, they employ a zoned layout with dedicated regions for entangling, storage, and readout. This architecture requires design automation software that efficiently compiles quantum circuits to this hardware and takes care that atoms are in the right place at the right time. In this paper, we initiate this line of work by providing, (1) an abstract model of the novel architecture and, (2) an efficient solution to the routing problem of entangling gates. By this, we aim to maximize the parallelism of entangling gates and minimize the overhead caused by the routing of atoms between zones. In addition to that, we keep the realm of fault-tolerant quantum computing in mind and consider logical qubit arrays, each of which encodes one logical qubit. We implemented the proposed idea as a tool called NALAC and demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency by showing that it can significantly reduce the routing overhead of logical entangling gates compared to the naive approach. As part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT), NALAC is publicly available as open-source at https://github.com/cda-tum/mqt-qmap.
Quantum computing architectures based on neutral atoms offer large scales and high-fidelity operations. They can be heterogeneous, with different zones for storage, entangling operations, and readout. Zoned architectures improve computation fidelity by shielding idling qubits in storage from side-effect noise, unlike monolithic architectures where all operations occur in a single zone. However, supporting these flexible architectures with efficient compilation remains challenging. In this paper, we propose ZAC, a scalable compiler for zoned architectures. ZAC minimizes data movement overhead between zones with qubit reuse, i.e., keeping them in the entanglement zone if an immediate entangling operation is pending. Other innovations include novel data placement and instruction scheduling strategies in ZAC, a flexible specification of zoned architectures, and an intermediate representation for zoned architectures, ZAIR. Our evaluation shows that zoned architectures equipped with ZAC achieve a 22x improvement in fidelity compared to monolithic architectures. Moreover, ZAC is shown to have a 10% fidelity gap on average compared to the ideal solution. This significant performance enhancement enables more efficient and reliable quantum circuit execution, enabling advancements in quantum algorithms and applications. ZAC is open source at https://github.com/UCLAVAST/ZAC
Neutral atom quantum computers (NAQC) are emerging as a promising, scalable quantum computing platform because of their long qubit coherence, flexible qubit arrangement, and multiqubit gate capabilities. However, circuit execution often requires physically moving qubits, making compilation a critical optimization challenge. We propose a circuit independent mathematical framework built on graph-theoretic combinatorial optimization that determines the minimal number of required qubit transfers. This model captures spatial constraints specific to NAQC platforms with zone-limited gate operations and multi-qubit gates. From this framework, we encode the qubit mapping problem as a nonlinear integer program and solve it using a genetic algorithm, enabling trade-offs between minimizing the total traveled distance and the number of parallel transfer operations. Compared to the state-of-the-art scalable compiler for zoned architectures, our approach consistently finds fewer transfers. Depending on the optimization focus, our method produces shorter traveled distances or fewer parallel transfer operations. This work provides both theoretical guaranties and a practical tool for efficient, architecture-aware quantum circuit compilation. As a result, practitioners can generate hardware-aware mappings that reduce movement-induced errors and better exploit atom transfer parallelism, directly improving execution efficiency on NAQC devices.