Blockade-induced exchange primitives for scalable neutral-atom QPU

Abstract

Many quantum hardware platforms natively support either phase or exchange operations, yet converting between these two forms of control typically incurs substantial overhead. Rydberg-blockade neutral-atom arrays are highly developed for phase control, while controlled exchange is usually obtained only through depth-intensive decompositions. Here, controlled exchange is realized as a native, blockade-programmed phenomenon in a collective excited manifold. Target atoms are engineered such that two competing exchange pathways between |01> and |10> destructively interfere, while a single collective four-photon channel mediated by a symmetric Rydberg excitation remains resonant and drives a direct SWAP, with all other qubit configurations undergoing an identity action. Exchange conditionality follows from blockade: exciting a control atom to a Rydberg state shifts and blocks the target collective resonance, suppressing exchange, whereas leaving the control in the ground manifold enables exchange in a single step. Anisotropic control-target interactions give rise to selective blockade, enabling coherent programmability of exchange among specific target pairs. This yields a family of controlled-SWAP primitives with process fidelities above 99% and an order-of-magnitude reduction in circuit depth and Rydberg-state exposure time compared with decomposed implementations. The same principle generalizes to multi-control and multiplexed controlled-exchange operations, providing compact hardware-level primitives for conditional information routing in extended neutral-atom arrays. More broadly, engineering interaction-tuned near-degeneracies in collective manifolds offers a route to programmable non-diagonal multiqubit operations across quantum platforms.