Pasqal

Pasqal is a French quantum-computing company that builds neutral-atom quantum computers. Founded in 2019 and based near Paris, it traces its technology to academic work at the Institut d'Optique on individually controlled atoms, associated with researchers including Alain Aspect, and its machines use optical tweezers to hold neutral atoms in place and Rydberg excitation to make them interact. It operates in both analog and digital modes.

#Neutral-atom approach

A Pasqal processor holds individual neutral atoms, cooled and trapped by tightly focused laser beams known as optical tweezers. The atoms can be arranged into programmable one-, two-, or three-dimensional patterns, and the layout can be reconfigured between runs. Qubits are encoded in atomic energy levels, and interactions are produced by exciting atoms to high-energy Rydberg states, in which two nearby atoms strongly influence each other. This Rydberg interaction provides the entangling mechanism for gates and for analog quantum simulation (Browaeys and Lahaye 2020). The modality is attractive because arrays of hundreds of atoms can be assembled and because the atoms are identical and reconfigurable, though gate fidelity and atom loss are active challenges.

#Analog and digital modes

Neutral-atom platforms can run in two regimes. In the analog mode, the whole array evolves under a programmable Hamiltonian, which is well suited to simulating condensed-matter and many-body physics problems and to certain optimization tasks. In the digital mode, the same hardware applies discrete gates to implement general quantum circuits. Pasqal has emphasized both, positioning analog quantum simulation as a near-term use while developing digital, gate-based operation for the longer term. Its processors, marketed under names such as Fresnel, are among the neutral-atom systems accessible for research as of early 2026, with arrays that hold on the order of hundreds of atoms. The company has also stated goals of assembling larger arrays, which it presents as targets rather than delivered capability.

#Status

Pasqal's machines are noisy intermediate-scale devices. Large neutral-atom arrays give high physical qubit counts, but as with every platform these are not error-corrected logical qubits, and headline atom counts should not be read as fault-tolerant capability. The company has not reported a fault-tolerant machine or a demonstrated advantage on a practical problem. Neutral atoms are nonetheless considered a serious contender because of the ease of scaling array size and the flexibility of atom placement.

#Relation to cryptography

Pasqal's digital mode targets universal gate-model computation, so a sufficiently large and error-corrected neutral-atom machine could in principle run Shor's algorithm. Current systems are far from that scale and are not error-corrected, so they pose no near-term threat to deployed cryptography. As with other modalities, relevance to the Post-quantum cryptography threat model is prospective and depends on unsolved scaling and error-correction work.