Mikhail Lukin

A physicist at Harvard whose group, with collaborators at MIT, QuEra and elsewhere, works with arrays of individual neutral atoms held by focused laser beams, known as optical tweezers.

In a neutral-atom machine each atom is a qubit. Exciting an atom to a highly energised 'Rydberg' state makes it strongly interact with its neighbours, which gives entangling gates, and the tweezers can be rearranged during a computation. Lukin's group has built programmable arrays of hundreds of atoms for simulating quantum matter and, in 2023, demonstrated a processor with dozens of error-detected and error-corrected 'logical' qubits.

Neutral atoms offer large numbers of identical qubits and flexible connectivity, and have become, alongside superconducting circuits, trapped ions and photons, one of the four main hardware routes. Which will win, or whether a mixture will, is not yet known.