Neutral-atom qubits
Qubits made from individual atoms held in place by focused laser beams, where quantum information is encoded in the atom's internal energy levels.
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Individual atoms — typically rubidium or ytterbium — are trapped in a grid of tightly focused laser beams called optical tweezers. Each atom is a qubit: its two lowest energy states encode 0, 1, and their superposition. Gates between qubits use a temporary "Rydberg" excitation that lets two nearby atoms interact. The approach lets engineers rearrange atoms mid-computation to fix the connectivity problem that plagues fixed-wired chips, and a single vacuum chamber can hold thousands of sites — which is why qubit counts in this modality have grown faster than any rival platform.
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The qubit count just collapsed
Breaking the encryption behind HTTPS and crypto wallets was thought to need millions of quantum qubits. A new resource estimate puts the floor at tens of thousands — the scale labs already run today.
The 9-minute window
When you spend Bitcoin, the transaction broadcasts your public key to the network for about nine minutes before it confirms — long enough, this paper argues, for a future quantum computer to derive your private key and steal the coins mid-transaction.
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