Zhihao Zhang

In the kitchen, there's a bucket of water and an identical bucket of sand. Pour the sand into the water, and you get a mixture where there's exactly five times more sand than water. That's roughly how our universe is arranged: one part ordinary matter — the stuff stars, planets, and we ourselves are made of — and five parts elusive dark matter.

A quantum computer based on neutral atoms is like a city where couriers, laser tweezers, physically carry packages between addresses. While one courier drags an atom across the entire chip, the others sit idle. This is slow and error-prone. The new architecture replaces couriers with a shared radio wave.