QuEra Aquila

Overview

QuEra Aquila is the machine that made neutral atom computing available to the public. It holds up to 256 rubidium atoms in a pattern that the user designs and evolves them under laser pulses so that their interactions simulate a quantum system. Since November 2022 it has been offered through Amazon Braket, which means anyone with an AWS account can program it.

Aquila is not a general-purpose computer. It is an analog simulator, best suited to problems that can be expressed as the behavior of interacting spins, such as quantum magnetism, phase transitions, and graph optimization. That limitation is also what makes it unusually well suited to scientific exploration.

History and background

QuEra was founded in 2018 by researchers from Harvard and MIT, including Mikhail Lukin, Markus Greiner, and Vladan Vuletić, whose labs pioneered programmable arrays of Rydberg atoms. A landmark 2021 experiment from the Harvard-MIT team with a 256-atom programmable simulator, published in Nature, helped establish the technology. QuEra commercialized the platform as Aquila and released it on Amazon Braket on November 1, 2022.

Aquila has since been used in research on quantum phases of matter, spin liquids, and optimization. QuEra's next-generation system, Gemini, adds gate-based digital operation with about 260 atoms and has been delivered to Japan's AIST and the UK's National Quantum Computing Centre. Researchers have also explored using Aquila in teaching and in public research programs such as NERSC's.

How it works

A vacuum chamber contains a cloud of rubidium atoms cooled by lasers. A grid of optical tweezers, created by shining a laser through an acousto-optic deflector or spatial light modulator, captures atoms at chosen positions. A camera reads out which sites are filled, and moving tweezers rearrange the atoms into a defect-free pattern.

The qubit is a pair of atomic states, a ground state and a highly excited Rydberg state. A global laser drives the transition between them. When an atom is in the Rydberg state, nearby atoms are shifted out of resonance, so two close atoms cannot both be excited at once, which is the Rydberg blockade. By tuning the laser's amplitude and detuning and by choosing the geometry, a user realizes Hamiltonians such as the transverse-field Ising model or the PXP model.

At the end of each run the atoms are imaged, and each atom is recorded as ground or Rydberg. Repeating the program thousands of times builds statistics. The datasheet lists detection errors of about 1% for false negatives and false positives, a higher error for misreading Rydberg atoms, and a limit of 256 filled sites set by the tweezer laser's power.

Connectivity

Programmable: users place up to 256 atoms in a two-dimensional field of about 75 by 76 micrometers with a minimum spacing of 4 micrometers

Specifications in detail

Key features

• Up to 256 atoms in user-defined 2D arrangements
• Analog Hamiltonian simulation using the Rydberg blockade
• Open to the public through Amazon Braket, with a free local emulator
• Programmable with the Bloqade software and the Braket SDK
• About three shots per second

Limitations

• Analog only: it does not support universal gate-based circuits
• Global drive on all atoms at once; limited local control
• Detection errors of about 1% per atom per shot and finite state preparation fidelity
• Field size and minimum spacing limit the geometries available

Timeline

What it is used for

• Simulating quantum magnetism and phase transitions
• Solving graph problems such as maximum independent set
• Teaching analog quantum programming
• Benchmarking neutral atom hardware against numerical simulation

How it compares

• Compared with Pasqal Fresnel (about 100 atoms), Aquila holds more atoms; both are analog neutral atom machines.
• Compared with D-Wave Advantage2, Aquila is a coherent quantum simulator with programmable geometry, while D-Wave runs an annealing protocol on fixed hardware connectivity.
• Compared with IBM or Google chips, Aquila has far more qubits but no universal gate set, so the two are not directly comparable.

Technical notes

Aquila realizes a driven Rydberg Hamiltonian. All atoms are driven by one global laser with a time-dependent Rabi frequency and detuning, and the atoms interact through van der Waals forces when excited to Rydberg states. Users choose atom positions and the waveforms. The maximum Rabi frequency is about 15.8 radians per microsecond, and the minimum atom spacing is 4 micrometers, which constrain which Hamiltonians can be programmed.

Why it matters

Aquila shows that a quantum computer can be useful to scientists even without gates. A 256-atom analog simulator already goes beyond what exact classical simulation can handle for some problems, and researchers worldwide can use it.

It also helps students. Because it is on Amazon Braket with open-source tools, Aquila is one of the easiest ways to run a program on genuine quantum hardware and to learn the basics of neutral atom physics.

Frequently asked questions

Keep exploring

• Company profile: QuEra Computing
• Related processor: Pasqal Fresnel (Orion generation)
• 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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