Mark Saffman

A chess game where pieces move only for castling, and all strikes are delivered from a standstill. That's the strategy physicists at Infleqtion chose for their 114-qubit quantum processor Sqale. Instead of shuttling neutral atoms to a dedicated zone before every operation, they learned to entangle them right on the spot using fine optical tweezers.

Atomic qubits 'snap' computations in microseconds, but capturing the result with a light-sensitive camera stretches out to milliseconds — thousands of times longer.

A laser beam usually looks like a straight column of light. But if you pass it through a wafer with a pattern thinner than a hair, the beam scatters into thousands of tiny pockets of light. In each pocket, you can suspend a single atom, like a pea in a dimple.