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A Rydberg atom is an excited atom with one or more electrons that have a very high principal quantum number. (Wikipedia)

It is a very soft metal. Its chemical element symbol is Rb, and its atomic number is 37. Rubidium is easy to source, affordable, and has adequate properties for laser manipulation.

Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum is the quantum computing era, where 50-1,000 qubits devices allow for the exploration of the entanglement frontier, beyond what classical computers can do.

In order to build a viable quantum processor, a broad variety of physical platforms are currently being investigated. Among them, arrays of single neutral atoms manipulated by light beams appear as a very powerful and scalable technology to manipulate quantum registers with up to a few thousand qubits. In such quantum processors, each qubit is encoded into two electronic states of an atom. Nature provides that all the qubits are strictly identical when taken independently, as opposed to artificial atoms such as superconducting circuits or Silicon spin qubits that need to be manufactured with as little heterogeneity as possible. This feature is a remarkable advantage for neutral atom quantum processors to achieve low error rates during the computation. Atomic devices present other clear advantages with respect to other platforms, such as a large connectivity and the ability to natively realize multi-qubit gates.

Algorithms are executed by implementing sequences of discrete operations, commonly known as quantum gates. In the digital approach, quantum algorithms are decomposed into a succession of quantum gates, from a set of pre-defined and calibrated operations. Digital computers are universal, but prone to errors. Thus, even large (multi-qubit) digital quantum computers have very limited capabilities, as of today.

In the analog case, the quantum computer evolves towards an answer continuously, at the opposite of by iterations in digital mode. Qubits are analog objects up until the point when they are measured and become digital. This means that quantum computers, even digital ones, will always be somewhat analog. The analog mode is somewhat less versatile than the digital mode, but also less susceptible to error (noise) and therefore will bring quantum advantage to industrial applications.

The era where quantum computers would perform better than classical computers, from a computation and efficiency point of view.

A quantum bit, unlike classical bits, carrying information in the form of digital 0 or 1, encodes information onto a collection of two-level quantum systems.