I find the editorialized title misleading. They trapped 17000 atom pairs in an optical lattice and demonstrated a high-fidelity quantum gate between the atoms of each pair in parallel. There is no interaction between the atoms of different pairs and no individual control. The experiment demonstrates a very robust gate scheme, but is a long way from a programmable computer.
> “We can now make lots of swap gates with neutral atoms”, says Tilman Esslinger, “but of course we still need a few other ingredients to build a working quantum computer.”
It is still orders of magnitude away from breaking RSA 2048 even under the most optimistic assumptions. And qubits double waaay slower than transistors so far.
I find the editorialized title misleading. They trapped 17000 atom pairs in an optical lattice and demonstrated a high-fidelity quantum gate between the atoms of each pair in parallel. There is no interaction between the atoms of different pairs and no individual control. The experiment demonstrates a very robust gate scheme, but is a long way from a programmable computer.
ETHZ news page is always overhyped. There is good research coming from there but their marketing is never worth reading.
its still more than my nephew managed to achieve this morning
With the hype QC these days, I find it hard to separate hype from real progress.
Judging by the other comments on here, they learned to title their articles from OpenAI and Anthropic.
And ... can it run Crysis?
:-D
Non-paywalled research paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22112
Seems like we are moving from theory to pactice faster than expected.
This is not a 17000 qubit general computer. Read the paper.
> “We can now make lots of swap gates with neutral atoms”, says Tilman Esslinger, “but of course we still need a few other ingredients to build a working quantum computer.”
For real? I wouldn't have thought so many would be possible so soon. Might actually need to look into quantum computing again after 20 years.
They did not make a 17000 qubit computer. The qubits were not controllable or general in any way. The paper is linked, look at it.
This title is misleading.
It is still orders of magnitude away from breaking RSA 2048 even under the most optimistic assumptions. And qubits double waaay slower than transistors so far.