Enabling Fast and Accurate Neutral Atom Readout through Image Denoising

TL;DR

This paper introduces GANDALF, a denoising framework that significantly accelerates neutral atom qubit readout while maintaining accuracy, thereby enhancing quantum error correction efficiency.

Contribution

GANDALF employs image translation denoising to enable faster, reliable qubit measurement from low-photon signals, surpassing existing CNN-based methods.

Findings

Reduces logical error rate by up to 35x

Speeds up QEC cycle time by up to 1.77x

Enables reliable classification with 1.6x shorter readout times

Abstract

Neutral atom quantum computers hold promise for scaling up to hundreds of thousands or more qubits, but their progress is constrained by slow qubit readout. Parallel measurement of qubit arrays currently takes milliseconds, much longer than the underlying quantum gate operations-making readout the primary bottleneck in deploying quantum error correction. Because each round of QEC depends on measurement, long readout times increase cycle duration and slow down program execution. Reducing the readout duration speeds up cycles and reduces decoherence errors that accumulate while qubits idle, but it also lowers the number of collected photons, making measurements noisier and more error-prone. This tradeoff leaves neutral atom systems stuck between slow but accurate readout and fast but unreliable readout. We show that image denoising can resolve this tension. Our framework, GANDALF, uses explicit denoising using image translation to reconstruct clear signals from short, low-photon measurements, enabling reliable classification at up to 1.6x shorter readout times. Combined with lightweight classifiers and a pipelined readout design, our approach both reduces logical error rate by up to 35x and overall QEC cycle time up to 1.77x compared to state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN)-based readout for Cesium (Cs) Neutral Atom arrays.