Sebastian Hassinger on why neutral atoms lead the qubit race for now and what comes after

[Dark Jaguar]

The Quantum Insider posted a crossover podcast between Yuval Boger, chief commercial officer at QuEra, and Sebastian Hassinger, host of The New Quantum Era podcast and author of a new book with the same name. It is a long, friendly conversation between two people who both came into quantum without physics PhDs. They cover how they wrote their books, how to explain quantum to non-physicists, and plenty of industry chat in between

The part that caught my attention was Hassinger's modality forecast from the end of his book. He sees neutral atoms holding a short-term advantage because of scale and progress in error correction, pointing to the Harvard and MIT demonstration of 48 logical qubits. He then expects superconducting qubits to take the lead in the medium term and spin qubits or photonics in the long run. His reasoning is that getting to millions or billions of qubits probably needs either CMOS-style fabrication or the scalability of photons

The weakness he flags for neutral atoms is wall clock speed. Moving atoms into place with lasers takes time, and he notes superconducting qubits run operations a thousand times faster or more. Boger, speaking with his QuEra hat on, pushes back hard. He argues time to solution matters more than clock speed, and points to parallelism and more efficient error correction

Boger also mentions a Harvard result on quantum memory where the ratio of physical to logical qubits was roughly two to one in simplified terms, which he then clarifies was more like 2,000 physical to 1,000 logical. He says QuEra's CTO Vladan Vuletic went from feeling confident about neutral atoms for five years to feeling comfortable about a ten year horizon. Obviously that comes from someone with a stake in the answer, and he says so

Other fun bits include QuEra's Aquila machine running about 130 hours a week on Amazon Braket for three and a half years, and Hassinger predicting a machine with around 50 fully entangleable logical qubits, beyond classical simulation, within five years. Boger thinks that is pessimistic. Feynman also wins the dinner guest question again, as it apparently usually does

For this forum, the resource estimates are the important thread. Boger mentions that Shor's algorithm was once thought to need around a million qubits and that figures around 30,000 now get mentioned. If the neutral atom camp is right about efficient codes, the path to a cryptographically relevant machine could be shorter than many roadmaps assume

Sebastian Hassinger (The New Quantum Era): why neutral atoms lead the qubit race for nowthequantuminsider.com

[Gaz_82]

Podcasters interviewing each other can get self-indulgent, but this one had real substance. Hassinger's staging of modalities over time is a sensible framework. Most people pick one winner and defend it forever

Boger's pushback on time to solution is fair as well. A slower machine that needs far fewer operations can still finish first

[Solo Lantern]

Neutral atoms short term, superconducting medium term and photonics long term is a tidy story. Reality will probably be messier, with different modalities winning different jobs

[KingCurtis27]

Wall clock speed is the neutral atom weak spot that QuEra people don't love discussing. Moving atoms with tweezers is slow compared with microwave pulses. Parallelism helps, but only so much. For long algorithms like Shor's, total runtime will matter a great deal

[Gary90]

Hitting 2,000 physical to 1,000 logical for quantum memory is remarkable if it holds

Memory is easier than computation though. The overhead for full logical operations will be much higher

[Delulu67]

Yuval works for QuEra, so of course he thinks neutral atoms win for a decade. That doesn't make him wrong. The Harvard work has been some of the most impressive in the field. Still, readers should weigh his comments knowing where his paycheck comes from. He was upfront about it, which I respect

[Vacant Niamh]

Trapped ions getting called even slower was a cheeky jab. IonQ fans will have something to say about that

[Matt_81]

Aquila running 130 hours a week on Braket for years is the kind of operational detail that impresses me more than qubit counts. Uptime is hard. A machine that people can actually book and use reliably is worth a lot

[RayOfLight31]

One Perfect Qubit as a working title for the sequel is great. Following a team as they build a machine that can't be classically simulated would make a compelling book. Tracy Kidder's approach suits that story well