arXiv subjects

Hannes Bernien

Publications and source records attributed to Hannes Bernien.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A hybrid quantum network linking telecom-wavelength atomic and solid-state nodes

Photonic links between disparate quantum technologies$-$such as photon sources, memories, processors, clocks, and sensors$-$are key to scaling quantum networks and realizing a versatile quantum internet for secure quantum communication, distributed quantum computing, and entanglement-enhanced metrology. In practice, each technology is most suitably implemented on a different quantum platform; the substantial spectral mismatch between them, along with scarce native telecom interfaces, thus poses a major bottleneck to achieving efficient interconnections over long distances. Here we demonstrate the first deployed two-node hybrid network that operates entirely in the telecom C-band. Our approach uses no quantum frequency conversion or external filtering; instead, we develop a neutral atom single photon source and a solid-state rare-earth quantum memory that both operate in previously unexplored telecom regimes with state-of-the-art performance. The source achieves a high single-photon purity at 46 kcps, and the memory a storage efficiency of 10.6% with high multimode capacity. We leverage the intrinsic tunability of both systems to optimize their spectral overlap and demonstrate microsecond-level storage and retrieval with a large time-bandwidth product. Moreover, we showcase real-world networking competencies such as support for multiplexing across 37 temporal modes and preservation of non-classicality over fibers of 10.6 km (metropolitan) and 49.2 km (laboratory). Our work establishes a backbone for telecom-native quantum repeater links and unlocks a path towards high-bandwidth, large-scale quantum networking.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Quantum Cellular Automata on a Dual-Species Rydberg Processor

As quantum devices scale to larger and larger sizes, a significant challenge emerges in scaling their coherent controls accordingly. Quantum cellular automata (QCAs) constitute a promising framework that bypasses this control problem: universal dynamics can be achieved using only a static qubit array and global control operations. Despite an extensive history of theoretical explorations and proposals, QCAs have not been experimentally explored in the context of highly-scalable globally-controlled systems. Here we realize QCAs on a dual-species Rydberg array of rubidium and cesium atoms, leveraging independent global control of each species to perform multiple quantum protocols. Seeding an automaton with different initial states, we explore many-body dynamics of quasiparticles and grow GHZ states across both species, highlighting the flexibility of our approach. We further develop a second automaton using a novel mediated entangling gate, enabling generation of 96.7(1.7)%-fidelity Bell states, 17-qubit cluster states, and high-connectivity graph states. Our results demonstrate that simple global controls enable access to a rich variety of applications through the QCA framework. The versatility and scalability of QCAs present compelling opportunities for the development of quantum information systems, as well as new perspectives on quantum many-body dynamics.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Engineering discrete local dynamics in globally driven dual-species atom arrays

We introduce a method for engineering discrete local dynamics in globally-driven dual-species neutral atom experiments, allowing us to study emergent digital models through uniform analog controls. Leveraging the new opportunities offered by dual-species systems, such as species-alternated driving, our construction exploits simple Floquet protocols on static atom arrangements, and benefits of generalized blockade regimes (different inter- and intra-species interactions). We focus on discrete dynamical models that are special examples of Quantum Cellular Automata (QCA), and explicitly consider a number of relevant examples, including the kicked-Ising model, the Floquet Kitaev honeycomb model, and the digitization of generic translation-invariant nearest-neighbor Hamiltonians (e.g., for Trotterized evolution). As an application, we study chaotic features of discretized many-body dynamics that can be detected by leveraging only demonstrated capabilities of globally-driven experiments, and benchmark their ability to discriminate chaotic evolution.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Efficient Entanglement Purification Circuit Design for Dual-Species Atom Arrays

Entanglement purification protocols (EPPs) are essential for generating high-fidelity entangled states in noisy quantum systems, enabling robust quantum networking and computation. Building on the circuit of the foundational recurrence protocol, we generalize two-way EPPs to arbitrary stabilizer codes. Through analytical derivations and noisy circuit simulations incorporating circuit-level noise, we demonstrate enhanced purification performance, with fidelity improvements and finite distillation rates for distillable input states. We propose efficient circuit designs for EPPs tailored to dual-species Rydberg atom arrays, leveraging species-specific laser control and interspecies Rydberg interactions. Introducing a low-overhead operation set, the dual-species atom convenient operation set, we facilitate straightforward compilation of EPP circuits without the need for ancillary atoms or complex atom rearrangements. Our framework provides practical guidance for near-term implementations on dual-species platforms, advancing towards scalable entanglement distribution in neutral atom systems and paving the way for fault-tolerant quantum technologies.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

atommovr: An open-source simulation framework for rearrangement in atomic arrays

The task of atom rearrangement has emerged in the last decade as a fundamental building block in the development of neutral atom-based quantum processors. As such processors grow to thousands of atoms, it becomes increasingly important to design algorithms robust to experimental sources of error. While recent progress has been made towards developing algorithms with favorable time scaling, such work has been limited to noiseless settings. Moreover, there is a lack of open-source code for reproducing and benchmarking existing algorithms. To address these deficiencies, we develop an open-source simulation framework, atommovr, and leverage it to study three distinct settings: 1) time-optimal, noiseless rearrangement, 2) noisy rearrangement under realistic error models, and 3) noiseless dual-species rearrangement. We extract lower bounds for time-optimal rearrangement, study advantageous strategies across different error regimes, and develop a novel dual-species algorithm, InsideOut, capable of avoiding 'blocked' configurations with a near-unity success rate. We hope that atommovr can serve as a common tool for the community to study rearrangement, lower the barrier to entry for new experimental groups, and stimulate progress in developing algorithms tailored to minimize atom loss in experiment.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Resource-state Quantum RAM for Fast and Error-Correctable Queries

Quantum devices can process data in a fundamentally different way than classical computers. To leverage this potential, many algorithms require the aid of a quantum Random Access Memory (QRAM), i.e. a module capable of efficiently loading datasets onto the quantum processor. However, a realisation of this building block is still outstanding due to its formidable resource requirements, which become even more demanding in quantum error-correction schemes. Here we show that the challenge of implementing QRAM can be entirely reduced to a state-preparation problem: since such resource-state is independent on the memory, our approach allows one to prepare it offline, opening the door to new design strategies. As an example, we introduce a heralded 'QRAM factory' which enables improved fidelities with high acceptance rate. More broadly, our results introduce the concept of resource-state QRAM: we study its performance in noisy settings, showing that it preserves the noise-resilience of standard QRAM, and discuss how it can be efficiently combined with quantum error-correction. Finally, we propose an implementation with neutral-atom hardware, where our analysis suggests that high-fidelity and low-latency queries can be implemented.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Deterministic high-rate entanglement distillation with neutral atom arrays

The goal of an entanglement distillation protocol is to convert large quantities of noisy entangled states into a smaller number of high-fidelity Bell pairs. The celebrated one-way hashing method is one such protocol, and it is known for being able to efficiently and deterministically distill entanglement in the asymptotic limit, i.e., when the size of the quantum system is very large. In this work, we consider setups with finite resources, e.g., a small fixed number of atoms in an atom array, and derive lower bounds on the distillation rate for the one-way hashing method. We provide analytical as well as numerical bounds on its entanglement distillation rate -- both significantly tighter than previously known bounds. We then show how the one-way hashing method can be efficiently implemented with neutral atom arrays. The combination of our theoretical results and the experimental blueprint we provide indicate that a full coherent implementation of the one-way hashing method is within reach with state-of-the-art quantum technology.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Circuit decompositions and scheduling for neutral atom devices with limited local addressability

Despite major ongoing advancements in neutral atom hardware technology, there remains limited work in systems-level software tailored to overcoming the challenges of neutral atom quantum computers. In particular, most current neutral atom architectures do not natively support local addressing of single-qubit rotations about an axis in the xy-plane of the Bloch sphere. Instead, these are executed via global beams applied simultaneously to all qubits. While previous neutral atom experimental work has used straightforward synthesis methods to convert short sequences of operations into this native gate set, these methods cannot be incorporated into a systems-level framework nor applied to entire circuits without imposing impractical amounts of serialization. Without sufficient compiler optimizations, decompositions involving global gates will significantly increase circuit depth, gate count, and accumulation of errors. No prior compiler work has addressed this, and adapting existing compilers to solve this problem is nontrivial. In this paper, we present an optimized compiler pipeline that translates an input circuit from an arbitrary gate set into a realistic neutral atom native gate set containing global gates. We focus on decomposition and scheduling passes that minimize the final circuit's global gate count and total global rotation amount. As we show, these costs contribute the most to the circuit's duration and overall error, relative to costs incurred by other gate types. Compared to the unoptimized version of our compiler pipeline, minimizing global gate costs gives up to 4.77x speedup in circuit duration. Compared to the closest prior existing work, we achieve up to 53.8x speedup. For large circuits, we observe a few orders of magnitude improvement in circuit fidelities.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Realizing fracton order from long-range quantum entanglement in programmable Rydberg atom arrays

Storing quantum information, unlike information in a classical computer, requires battling quantum decoherence, which results in a loss of information over time. To achieve error-resistant quantum memory, one would like to store the information in a quantum superposition of degenerate states engineered in such a way that local sources of noise cannot change one state into another, thus preventing quantum decoherence. One promising concept is that of fracton order -- a phase of matter with a large ground state degeneracy that grows subextensively with the system size. Unfortunately, the models realizing fractons are not friendly to experimental implementations as they require unnatural interactions between a substantial number (of the order of ten) of qubits. We demonstrate how this limitation can be circumvented by leveraging the long-range quantum entanglement created using only pairwise interactions between the code and ancilla qubits, realizable in programmable tweezer arrays of Rydberg atoms. We show that this platform also allows to detect and correct certain types of errors en route to the goal of true error-resistant quantum memory.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Rydberg platform for non-ergodic chiral quantum dynamics

We propose a mechanism for engineering chiral interactions in Rydberg atoms via a directional antiblockade condition, where an atom can change its state only if an atom to its right (or left) is excited. The scalability of our scheme enables us to explore the many-body dynamics of kinetically constrained models with unidirectional character. We observe non-ergodic behavior via either scars, confinement, or localization, upon simply tuning the strength of two driving fields acting on the atoms. We discuss how our mechanism persists in the presence of classical noise and how the degree of chirality in the interactions can be tuned, opening towards the frontier of directional, strongly correlated, quantum mechanics using neutral atoms arrays.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2024

Hybrid Quantum Repeaters with Ensemble-based Quantum Memories and Single-spin Photon Transducers

Reliable quantum communication over hundreds of kilometers is a daunting yet necessary requirement for a quantum internet. To overcome photon loss, the deployment of quantum repeater stations between distant network nodes is necessary. A plethora of different quantum hardware is being developed for this purpose, each platform with its own opportunities and challenges. Here, we propose to combine two promising hardware platforms in a hybrid quantum repeater architecture to lower the cost and boost the performance of long-distance quantum communication. We outline how ensemble-based quantum memories combined with single-spin photon transducers, which can transfer quantum information between a photon and a single spin, can facilitate massive multiplexing, efficient photon generation, and quantum logic for amplifying communication rates. As a specific example, we describe how a single Rubidium (Rb) atom coupled to nanophotonic resonators can function as a high-rate, telecom-visible entangled photon source with the visible photon being compatible with storage in a Thulium-doped crystal memory (Tm-memory) and the telecom photon being compatible with low loss fiber propagation. We experimentally verify that Tm and Rb transitions are in resonance with each other. Our analysis shows that by employing up to 9 repeater stations, each equipped with two Tm-memories capable of holding up to 625 storage modes, along with four single Rb atoms, one can reach a quantum communication rate of about 10 secret bits per second across distances of up to 1000 km.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Donor-Acceptor Pairs in Wide-Bandgap Semiconductors for Quantum Technology Applications

We propose a quantum science platform utilizing the dipole-dipole coupling between donor-acceptor pairs (DAPs) in wide bandgap semiconductors to realize optically controllable, long-range interactions between defects in the solid state. We carry out calculations based on density functional theory (DFT) to investigate the electronic structure and interactions of DAPs formed by various substitutional point defects in diamond and silicon carbide (SiC). We determine the most stable charge states and evaluate zero phonon lines using constrained DFT and compare our results with those of simple donor-acceptor pair (DAP) models. We show that polarization differences between ground and excited states lead to unusually large electric dipole moments for several DAPs in diamond and SiC. We predict radiative lifetimes and photoluminescence spectra for selected substitutional atoms and show that while B-N pairs in diamond are challenging to control due to their large electron-phonon coupling, DAPs in SiC, especially Al-N pairs, are suitable candidates to realize long-range optically controllable interactions.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

A dual-species Rydberg array

Rydberg atom arrays have emerged as a leading platform for quantum information science. Reaching system sizes of hundreds of long-lived qubits, these arrays are used for highly coherent analog quantum simulation, as well as digital quantum computation. Advanced quantum protocols such as quantum error correction, however, require midcircuit qubit operations, including the replenishment, reset, and readout of a subset of qubits. A compelling strategy to achieve these capabilities is a dual-species architecture in which a second atomic species can be controlled without crosstalk, and entangled with the first via Rydberg interactions. Here, we realize a dual-species Rydberg array consisting of rubidium (Rb) and cesium (Cs) atoms, and explore new regimes of interactions and dynamics not accessible in single-species architectures. We achieve enhanced interspecies interactions by electrically tuning the Rydberg states close to a Forster resonance. In this regime, we demonstrate interspecies Rydberg blockade and implement quantum state transfer from one species to another. We then generate a Bell state between Rb and Cs hyperfine qubits via an interspecies controlled-phase gate. Finally, we combine interspecies entanglement with native midcircuit readout to achieve quantum non-demolition measurement of a Rb qubit using an auxiliary Cs qubit. The techniques demonstrated here pave the way toward scalable measurement-based protocols and real-time feedback control in large-scale quantum systems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

An integrated atom array -- nanophotonic chip platform with background-free imaging

Arrays of neutral atoms trapped in optical tweezers have emerged as a leading platform for quantum information processing and quantum simulation due to their scalability, reconfigurable connectivity, and high-fidelity operations. Individual atoms are promising candidates for quantum networking due to their capability to emit indistinguishable photons that are entangled with their internal atomic states. Integrating atom arrays with photonic interfaces would enable distributed architectures in which nodes hosting many processing qubits could be efficiently linked together via the distribution of remote entanglement. However, many atom array techniques cease to work in close proximity to photonic interfaces, with atom detection via standard fluorescence imaging presenting a major challenge due to scattering from nearby photonic devices. Here, we demonstrate an architecture that combines atom arrays with up to 64 optical tweezers and a millimeter-scale photonic chip hosting more than 100 nanophotonic devices. We achieve high-fidelity (~99.2%), background-free imaging in close proximity to nanofabricated devices using a multichromatic excitation and detection scheme. The atoms can be imaged while trapped a few hundred nanometers above the dielectric surface, which we verify using Stark shift measurements of the modified trapping potential. Finally, we rearrange atoms into defect-free arrays and load them simultaneously onto the same or multiple devices.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Quantum networks with neutral atom processing nodes

Quantum networks providing shared entanglement over a mesh of quantum nodes will revolutionize the field of quantum information science by offering novel applications in quantum computation, enhanced precision in networks of sensors and clocks, and efficient quantum communication over large distances. Recent experimental progress with individual neutral atoms demonstrates a high potential for implementing the crucial components of such networks. We highlight latest developments and near-term prospects on how arrays of individually controlled neutral atoms are suited for both efficient remote entanglement generation and large-scale quantum information processing, thereby providing the necessary features for sharing high-fidelity and error-corrected multi-qubit entangled states between the nodes. We describe both the functionality requirements and several examples for advanced, large-scale quantum networks composed of neutral atom processing nodes.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Mid-circuit correction of correlated phase errors using an array of spectator qubits

Scaling up invariably error-prone quantum processors is a formidable challenge. While quantum error correction ultimately promises fault-tolerant operation, the required qubit overhead and error thresholds are daunting, and many codes break down under correlated noise. Recent proposals have suggested a complementary approach based on co-located, auxiliary 'spectator' qubits. These act as in-situ probes of noise, and enable real-time, coherent corrections of the resulting errors on the data qubits. Here, we use an array of cesium spectator qubits to correct correlated phase errors on an array of rubidium data qubits. Crucially, by combining in-sequence readouts, data processing, and feed-forward operations, these correlated errors are suppressed within the execution of the quantum circuit. The protocol is broadly applicable to quantum information platforms, and our approach establishes key tools for scaling neutral-atom quantum processors: mid-circuit readout of atom arrays, real-time processing and feed-forward, and coherent mid-circuit reloading of atomic qubits.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Exploiting Long-Distance Interactions and Tolerating Atom Loss in Neutral Atom Quantum Architectures

Quantum technologies currently struggle to scale beyond moderate scale prototypes and are unable to execute even reasonably sized programs due to prohibitive gate error rates or coherence times. Many software approaches rely on heavy compiler optimization to squeeze extra value from noisy machines but are fundamentally limited by hardware. Alone, these software approaches help to maximize the use of available hardware but cannot overcome the inherent limitations posed by the underlying technology. An alternative approach is to explore the use of new, though potentially less developed, technology as a path towards scalability. In this work we evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of a Neutral Atom (NA) architecture. NA systems offer several promising advantages such as long range interactions and native multiqubit gates which reduce communication overhead, overall gate count, and depth for compiled programs. Long range interactions, however, impede parallelism with restriction zones surrounding interacting qubit pairs. We extend current compiler methods to maximize the benefit of these advantages and minimize the cost. Furthermore, atoms in an NA device have the possibility to randomly be lost over the course of program execution which is extremely detrimental to total program execution time as atom arrays are slow to load. When the compiled program is no longer compatible with the underlying topology, we need a fast and efficient coping mechanism. We propose hardware and compiler methods to increase system resilience to atom loss dramatically reducing total computation time by circumventing complete reloads or full recompilation every cycle.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

A dual-element, two-dimensional atom array with continuous-mode operation

Quantum processing architectures that include multiple qubit modalities offer compelling strategies for high-fidelity operations and readout, quantum error correction, and a path for scaling to large system sizes. Such hybrid architectures have been realized for leading platforms, including superconducting circuits and trapped ions. Recently, a new approach for constructing large, coherent quantum processors has emerged based on arrays of individually trapped neutral atoms. However, these demonstrations have been limited to arrays of a single atomic element where the identical nature of the atoms makes crosstalk-free control and non-demolition readout of a large number of atomic qubits challenging. Here we introduce a dual-element atom array with individual control of single rubidium and cesium atoms. We demonstrate their independent placement in arrays with up to 512 trapping sites and observe negligible crosstalk between the two elements. Furthermore, by continuously reloading one atomic element while maintaining an array of the other, we demonstrate a new continuous operation mode for atom arrays without any off-time. Our results enable avenues for ancilla-assisted quantum protocols such as quantum non-demolition measurements and quantum error correction, as well as continuously operating quantum processors and sensors.

quant-ph↗