C: Photonic Engine to Accelerate Atomic Quantum Engineering (PEAQUE)

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The NSF Convergence Accelerator program supports use-inspired, team-based, multidisciplinary efforts that address challenges of national importance and will produce deliverables of value to society in the near future. The goal of this project is to develop the hardware that would be useful in miniaturizing quantum computers. The specific goal for this Photonic Engine Accelerating Atomic Quantum Engineering (PEAQUE) project is to develop an integrated photonic control engine to power a NISQ-scale cold atom quantum computer with more than 1000 qubits. The project is a convergent effort on a system-level integration of optical and atomic hardware, quantum software, and quantum metrology. The intellectual merit of this project lies in development of miniaturized Multi-Beam Illumination and Steering (MBIS) modules that reduce current room-sized, bulk-optics instrumentation to miniaturized and scalable systems, which is a key scaling challenge and pain-point in cold atom quantum computing. The MBIS modules will be multiplexed to perform massively parallelized local gate operations on 1000s of qubits at high speed. The project will result in development of color codes for quantum error correction (QEC) designed specifically for cold atom qubits and enabled by optical control hardware to improve the fidelity of NISQ processors. The hardware developed under this project will push the boundaries of precision measurement by advancing the state-of-the-art atomic clocks. This project will focus on development and implementation of a fully programmable atomic system aiming to achieve commercial-level demonstration of gate-based quantum computing and quantum simulation.The broader impact of this project will be from the availability of a new and imperative optical control technology that is critically needed by quantum computing and simulation based on atomic qubits. The project aims to disseminate the technology to a broaduser base by manufacturing the hardware on wafer scale and developing testing kits to be. The projectalso includes significant effort in quantum workforce training, education and outreach with an integratedplan of industry internships in quantum science and engineering, recruitment and training of studentsfrom underrepresented groups, course development in quantum technology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.