An invisible trap made of laser light held 11,000 atoms — a record for quantum engineering. Previously, physicists wrestled with a few dozen of these particles; now the count runs into the thousands. Each atom becomes a qubit — a quantum bit that is both zero and one at once, like a spinning coin balanced on its edge.
The key to success is a flat metasurface the size of a coin. It acts like a lens without bulky glass, mounted outside the vacuum chamber. Light beams focus into perfect pinpoint dots, holding atoms like beads on invisible strings. The loading process is chaotic, some spots remain empty, but this very messiness, called entropy (a measure of disorder), only helps the system work.
Amazingly, inside the chamber the pressure is a billion times lower than atmospheric — almost a cosmic vacuum, without which any collision would shatter the quantum state. Back in the day, Richard Feynman and David Deutsch dreamed of such computers: they could simulate drugs and crack codes, tackling problems beyond the reach of regular machines.
The metasurface, replacing bulky optics, is no bigger than a coin, yet it can create 11,000 laser traps at once.
Quantum computers are often depicted in science fiction as machines of incredible power — for example, in Hannu Rajaniemi's novel 'The Quantum Thief'.