On June 23, Shanghai-based Chinese company Xuanxiang Technology successfully developed the world's first metasurface chip capable of generating a million-level atomic optical tweezer array, breaking through the core optical bottleneck that has long constrained the scalable expansion of neutral atom quantum computing, and providing a key prerequisite hardware capability for moving toward million-qubit-level universal fault-tolerant quantum computing. This achievement was jointly tackled by China's Xuanxiang Technology and Chinese atomic quantum computing company Zhongqi Wuliang, with Xuanxiang Technology responsible for chip development and Zhongqi Wuliang providing the neutral atom experimental platform and system-level verification support.

This million-level optical tweezer chip is designed to meet the demands of ultra-large-scale atomic qubit preparation. Xuanxiang Technology integrates hundreds of millions of nanoscale optical units within an area the size of a fingertip, capable of directly converting a single laser beam into a million-level optical tweezer array, significantly reducing the complexity of atomic optical tweezer systems. Traditional neutral atom experimental systems typically rely on large-scale free-space optical paths to generate controlled atomic arrays, resulting in complex system structures and array sizes limited by key devices such as spatial light modulators and acousto-optic deflectors. The chip-based approach compresses optical field generation capabilities into micro-nano structures, providing a new engineering pathway for subsequent standardized integration, batch replication, and continuous iteration.

Neutral atom quantum computing requires first using optical tweezer arrays to individually trap cooled atoms in a vacuum environment, then achieving quantum gate manipulation through laser excitation and inter-atomic interactions. The stability of atom loading, arrangement, and readout directly affects the scalability of qubit count. This million-level atomic optical tweezer array metasurface chip addresses the prerequisite issue of "preparing enough atomic sites first." It does not equate to building a million-qubit quantum computer, but it provides a larger optical foundation for subsequent large-scale atom loading, system integration, and fault-tolerant architecture verification.

Xuanxiang Technology and Zhongqi Wuliang have conducted multiple rounds of verification around optical path coupling, array characterization, platform adaptation, and testing procedures. Zhongqi Wuliang's neutral atom experimental platform provides a real operating environment for the chip and feeds back the system's actual requirements for the optical tweezer array into the chip design, preparation, and verification iteration process, ultimately completing a closed loop from chip preparation and optical field testing to real-machine verification on a neutral atom platform for the million-level metasurface optical tweezer chip. Another neutral atom company in Shanghai, Taiyi Liangsheng, has also adopted this series of optical tweezer chips and is conducting experiments related to large-scale arrays.

Xuanxiang Technology stated that in the next phase, based on the million-level optical tweezer chip, it will collaborate with Shanghai's quantum industry ecosystem partners to continue tackling engineering challenges such as loading over one hundred thousand atoms, full-system integration, and long-term stable operation. For neutral atom quantum computing, the million-level optical tweezer array is only one key hardware component on the path to scaling; subsequent efforts still need to verify aspects such as atom loading efficiency, quantum gate fidelity, low-crosstalk control, error correction resource organization, and long-term system stability. This achievement also demonstrates that Shanghai has formed a foundation for collaborative breakthroughs across the neutral atom, optical chip, micro-nano manufacturing, and precision optics industry chains.