Pasqal Fresnel (Orion generation)

Overview

Pasqal Fresnel is the cloud-accessible neutral atom processor from the French company Pasqal. It traps around a hundred rubidium atoms in a pattern chosen by the user and then drives them with laser pulses so that they interact. Pasqal now groups its machines in an Orion family, with generations named Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, and the 100-qubit cloud machine is the most widely used.

Fresnel works differently from the gate-based machines described elsewhere in this database. It is primarily an analog quantum simulator: instead of running a sequence of logic gates, it lets a quantum system evolve in a controlled way and measures the result.

History and background

Pasqal was founded in 2019 as a spin-off from the Institut d'Optique near Paris, built on neutral atom research by Antoine Browaeys, Thierry Lahaye, and Nobel laureate Alain Aspect. The company's first cloud-accessible machine, Fresnel, became available to users around 2023 and 2024, and it is housed in Pasqal's data center at Massy, France. Later it was made available through Microsoft Azure Quantum and the Google Cloud Marketplace, and in 2025 through European sovereign clouds Scaleway and OVHcloud.

Pasqal has also installed systems on customer sites, including at supercomputing centers in France, Germany, and Italy, and a 200-qubit system for Aramco. Its newer Orion Gamma generation supports more than 140 qubits, and a Pasqal research team prepared defect-free 1,024-atom registers in 2026. Fresnel remains the entry point for developers who want to try neutral atom hardware.

How it works

A vacuum chamber holds a cloud of rubidium-87 atoms, which lasers cool to a few microkelvin. A spatial light modulator shapes a laser beam into a pattern of tiny focal spots called optical tweezers. Each tweezer can capture one atom, and cameras image which spots are occupied. Because loading is random, only about half of the traps fill on a first try, so the system rearranges atoms by moving tweezers until a defect-free pattern is formed.

Qubits are encoded in two internal electronic states of each atom. To make atoms interact, a laser excites them to a Rydberg state, in which an electron is far from the nucleus. Two Rydberg atoms close together strongly shift each other's energy, so only one in a cluster can be excited at a time, an effect called the Rydberg blockade. By choosing positions, a user designs a network of interactions, and by shaping the laser's amplitude and frequency over time, the user steers the system toward interesting states.

A typical program is written in Pulser, Pasqal's open-source library, as a register layout plus a pulse sequence. The machine runs the sequence many times, each run taking seconds because atoms must be loaded and imaged, and returns a histogram of measurement outcomes. Pasqal's emulators run the same programs on classical hardware for testing.

Connectivity

Programmable: the geometry of the atom array sets which atoms interact through the Rydberg blockade

Specifications in detail

Key features

• Up to about 100 atoms in a user-defined arrangement
• Analog mode for quantum simulation and graph optimization
• Room-temperature operation, with atoms cooled by lasers instead of a dilution refrigerator
• Available on Pasqal Cloud, Azure Quantum, Google Cloud Marketplace, Scaleway, and OVHcloud
• Programmed with the open-source Pulser library

Limitations

• Analog mode cannot run general-purpose gate-based algorithms
• Repetition rate is slow: about 0.25 shots per second up to 80 qubits and 0.1 per second up to 100
• Atom loss and imperfect detection add noise to every shot
• Gate-based, error-corrected operation is still in development

Timeline

What it is used for

• Simulating quantum magnetism and other many-body physics
• Solving graph problems such as maximum independent set
• Quantum machine learning experiments that encode data in atom geometry
• Benchmarking neutral atom hardware and learning analog quantum programming

How it compares

• Compared with QuEra Aquila (256 atoms), Fresnel has fewer atoms, but both are analog neutral atom machines with similar physics.
• Compared with IBM or Google, Fresnel does not use gates, so qubit counts and error rates are not directly comparable.
• Compared with D-Wave Advantage2, both are specialized rather than universal, but Fresnel is a coherent quantum simulator while D-Wave's machine is an annealer.

Technical notes

In analog mode the processor realizes a Hamiltonian, a description of how the system's energy depends on its parts. Atoms excited to Rydberg states interact strongly when close together and not at all when far apart, which creates a blockade effect that naturally encodes graph problems such as maximum independent set. The user chooses atom positions and the time-dependence of the laser's strength and detuning, and the machine evolves accordingly.

Why it matters

Fresnel lets developers and researchers work with a neutral atom computer today. Because the technology scales in atom number more easily than superconducting wiring, it is one of the more promising paths to large machines.

For learners, it is a good way to see the difference between analog and digital quantum computing. Programming a Hamiltonian is a different mindset than writing circuits, and understanding both is increasingly valuable.

Frequently asked questions

Keep exploring

• Company profile: Pasqal
• Related processor: QuEra Aquila
• Related processor: D-Wave Advantage2
• Related processor: IBM Heron (r1, r2, and r3)

This profile is written for educational purposes and summarizes company announcements, published papers, and vendor specification sheets. Last reviewed: September 30, 2026. Figures marked as company-reported have not all been independently verified, and benchmarks differ between vendors, so compare them with care.

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