• Accepted Paper

Fault-tolerant quantum computation with static atomic buses

M. Bergonzoni, L. Pecorari, S. A. Norrell, C. Poole, G. Pupillo, and M. Saffman

PRX Quantum - Accepted 9 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/n1ll-yxtt

Abstract

Efficient quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computing require scalable, high-fidelity long-range connectivity. In neutral-atom quantum computers, this is commonly achieved through atom transport, but shuttling introduces latency and motional heating that worsen with system size. Here, we introduce a neutral-atom architecture based on static atomic buses, in which auxiliary mediator atoms enable long-range entangling operations without qubit transport. The architecture naturally supports long-range stabilizer measurements in high-rate LDPC codes and transversal logical gates between neighboring surface-code patches, enabling a modular framework for efficient logical memories, Clifford computation, and magic-state distillation. To realize these capabilities, we co-design optimal-control protocols for bus-mediated controlled-Z gates that incorporate both microscopic neutral-atom dynamics and architectural constraints. We obtain smooth bus-mediated gates with fidelities approaching 99.9% and durations of a few hundred nanoseconds by combining time-optimal control with interaction-flatness and robustness constraints. Large-scale simulations of quantum error correction and logical entangling operations between neighboring surface-code patches predict more than an order-of-magnitude improvement in logical error rates compared with atom-shuttling architectures under realistic noise. The architecture achieves logical gate times of approximately 100 µs and quantum-error-correction cycle times of about 1 ms for code distances d ≲ 12. These results establish static atomic buses as a practical alternative to atom shuttling for scalable fault-tolerant neutral-atom quantum computing.

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