A new light-based breakthrough could…

A new light-based breakthrough could help quantum computers finally scale up. Stanford researchers created miniature optical cavities that efficiently collect light from individual atoms, allowing many qubits to be read at once. The team has already demonstrated working arrays with dozens and even hundreds of cavities. The approach could eventually support massive quantum networks with millions of qubits.

In research published in Nature, the team describes a system made up of 40 optical cavities, each holding a single atom qubit, along with a larger prototype that contains more than 500 cavities. The results point to a realistic route toward building quantum computing networks that could one day include as many as a million qubits.