Mikhail Lukin’s team at Harvard presented a “universal” design for neutral-atom processors with robust error-correction capabilities using just 448 qubits, alongside a 3,000-qubit processor that can run for hours.

As Lukin notes: “These are really new kinds of instruments—by some measures, they’re not even computers… What’s really exciting is that these systems are now working already at a reasonable scale and we can start experimenting with them to figure out what we can do with them.”

A string of surprising advances suggests usable quantum computers could be here in a decade.