Briefs · Frontier Science
6,100 qubits that can hold their breath for 13 seconds
Caltech has built the largest qubit array ever assembled, and — for once — the size is not the headline.
On 24 September, physicists led by Manuel Endres reported in Nature a grid of 6,100 neutral-atom qubits: individual cesium atoms trapped by optical tweezers, highly focused laser beams, after one laser was split into 12,000 tweezers. Previous arrays of this kind held only hundreds of qubits.
The numbers that matter are the quiet ones. The team kept more than 6,000 qubits in superposition for about 13 seconds — nearly ten times longer than in previous similar arrays — while manipulating individual qubits with 99.98% accuracy. Coherence is the currency of quantum computing: the longer a qubit holds its state, the more computation you can do before it collapses.
There is a catch, and the team states it plainly. The 6,100 atoms have not yet been entangled into a full computation. Size alone is not computing power; entangling them is the next step, and error correction across thousands of physical qubits is the milestone after that.
Conclusion: this array is not a quantum computer, but rather a quantum cathedral — cesium, calm, coherent, and waiting for its congregation.
Read the original at Phys.org (Caltech, Whitney Clavin)
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