September 4, 2024 —- In the past year, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has teamed up with the Boston-based quantum computing company QuEra Computing, exploring one up-and-coming approach to quantum computing known as neutral-atom technology. After a successful first year punctuated with strong scientific results, the partnership has been extended, with plans to offer neutral-atom quantum computing access to some users in the coming year.

Neutral atoms can be used to build quantum computing devices. The technology works by trapping these atoms – neutral atoms rather than charged ions, hence the name – with lasers called optical tweezers and exciting their outer electrons to higher energy states. By using optical tweezers, researchers can control and arrange the atoms into useful configurations, even rearranging them to try out particular geometries or compute the properties of certain materials.

This flexibility is one of the main strengths of neutral-atom technology. According to NERSC quantum computing team member Daan Camps, another advantage is the sheer number of atoms it can accommodate: “Neutral-atom quantum computing devices can incorporate hundreds of atoms, which allows for quantum computations at larger scale,” he said. Yet another advantage is the ability to work at room temperatures without cryogenic cooling, making neutral-atom computers attractive for deployment at HPC centers.

The collaboration between QuEra and NERSC began in March 2023 as the NERSC quantum computing team evaluated a variety of industry partners and their approaches to quantum computing. QuEra’s results were promising – and at the time, no U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) lab had access to commercial neutral-atom technology. A partnership with QuEra offered a way to gain access to this new technology.

The partnership has proven to be a true collaboration, with the NERSC team gaining skills and QuEra’s hardware improving as NERSC offered feedback from the user perspective – and yielding robust scientific results proves the strength of the partnership. The first scientific results have been disseminated as part of three joint papers the teams have released to date. These papers study how neutral-atom quantum computers can be used to study quantum dynamics, solve optimization problems, and prepare entangled quantum states.

After the success of its first year, NERSC’s partnership with QuEra has been renewed for a second year, during which the NERSC team is looking forward to exploring recent hardware upgrades to QuEra’s system, as well as pursuing a particularly exciting milestone: allowing a small number of users to incorporate QuEra’s quantum hardware into their research, with training from QuEra and the NERSC quantum team. The team recently released a call for proposals seeking projects from across the field of QIS. The deadline to apply is September 6, 2024.