In September Microsoft announced their collaboration with Atom Computing to build the world’s most powerful quantum machine, and create a unique commercial offering which is available for order today.

Just two months after this announcement we are excited to share the news that together we have now entangled 24 logical qubits, setting a new world record. We also jointly demonstrated error detection, correction, and computation with 28 logical qubits on Atom’s flagship systems. More information on this work can be found in the Azure Quantum technical blog.

At the same time, Atom Computing is announcing the demonstration of the highest two-qubit gate fidelity in a commercial neutral atom system. This is another important milestone in the company’s race to build fault-tolerant quantum computers, achieving state-of-the-art single-qubit and two-qubit gate fidelities in Atom’s second-generation systems.

In a preprint article on arXiv, the Atom team reported the measured performance of qubits contained in an optical tweezer array, with a 99.963(2)% single-qubit gate fidelity, and a 99.56(5)% two-qubit gate fidelity, demonstrating the best neutral-atom two-qubit gate fidelity in a commercial system.

Dr. Ben Bloom, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, said “We are excited to show how our highly scalable neutral atom technology can be used to create large numbers of high-fidelity qubits that are a crucial part of Atom’s strategy to building fault tolerant quantum computers.”

Fault tolerant quantum computing is essential for being able to solve large computational problems that enable scientific and economic value beyond classical computing, and it requires the integration of multiple advanced technologies and quantum error correction algorithms to provide sufficient reliable computing resources in a sustainable way.

With these results, Atom Computing’s second-generation systems have now demonstrated all of the key ingredients necessary for supporting quantum error correction, including large numbers of high-fidelity physical qubits which have all-to-all connectivity, long coherence times, and mid-circuit measurement with qubit reset and reuse.

Atom Computing will continue to energetically drive their technical roadmap and, together with Microsoft, demonstrate significant milestones towards achieving scientific and commercial advantage faster than previously thought possible.

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For more information, see Atom Computing's technical paper, our joint technical paper, Microsoft's Azure Quantum technical blog, and sign up for the Quantum Insider Webinar - featuring both Microsoft and Atom Computing - on January 16, 2025 to learn more about our collaboration.

Atom Computing has been on a singular mission to win the race to fault tolerant quantum computing using our highly scalable neutral atom technology.  Today Microsoft announced a game-changing collaboration to extend our lead in the race: together we will build the world’s most powerful quantum computer on a path to scientific and commercial advantage. Microsoft and Atom Computing have been working closely together to accelerate the development of fault-tolerant quantum supercomputers that can solve impactful problems too difficult for even the most powerful classical supercomputing systems.

Why is it important for quantum computers to be fault-tolerant? For most existing quantum computing technologies the fundamental physical qubits that these technologies work with are not perfect; the qubits pick up environmental noise, have unwanted interactions with each other, and can be difficult to manipulate within the quantum computing platform itself. In order to run large and meaningful calculations the error rates need to be many orders of magnitude smaller than what’s possible with individual physical qubits.

There is a solution to overcoming the limitations of individual physical qubits: by using advanced algorithms and techniques – also known as “quantum error-correction” – multiple physical qubits can be grouped together to form a single so-called “logical qubit” which then acts like a single effective qubit with very low error. The advantage of logical qubits is that they can be scaled to have almost arbitrary low error rates by leveraging numerous physical qubits and clever encoding schemes. This paves the road to running algorithms that are extremely resistant to the imperfect operations of individual physical qubits.

Atom Computing’s second-generation systems are enabling the co-development and logical qubit demonstrations with Microsoft.

Atom Computing’s neutral atom-based hardware uniquely combines all the necessary capabilities essential for enabling quantum error-correction, including large numbers of high-fidelity qubits, all-to-all qubit connectivity, long coherence times, and mid-circuit measurement with qubit reset and reuse. Running on Atom Computing’s second-generation systems, Microsoft is optimizing their error-correcting codes and developing algorithms for fault tolerant applications.

Atom Computing and Microsoft are collaborating to rapidly develop utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum supercomputers.

Both Atom Computing and Microsoft have been contributing significant resources to integrate upgrades across the full hardware and software stack to efficiently create logical qubits and accelerating toward scientific and commercial advantage.  In the near term, our goal is to advance Level 2 resilient computation by entangling multiple logical qubits with very low logical error rates.  Driven by Atom Computing’s ability to scale the number of physical qubits by tenfold with each generation of our systems, we will together continue to demonstrate significant milestones faster than previously thought possible.

The entire team at Atom Computing is excited to collaborate with Microsoft on this journey to deliver quantum supercomputers that will unlock tremendous value for society and industry!

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For more information, see Microsoft’s announcement and Microsoft's technical blog on our collaboration.