PowerMove: Optimizing Compilation for Neutral Atom Quantum Computers with Zoned Architecture

Neutral atom quantum computers (NAQCs) have emerged as promising candidates for scalable quantum computing, thanks to their advanced hardware capabilities, particularly qubit movement and the Zoned Architecture (ZA). However, fully harnessing these features presents significant compilation challenges, requiring careful coordination across gate scheduling, qubit positioning, atom movement, and inter-zone communication. In this paper, we propose PowerMove, an efficient compiler for NAQCs that unlocks new optimization opportunities, significantly improving qubit movement strategies while seamlessly integrating ZA. Our evaluation demonstrates orders-of-magnitude fidelity improvements over state-of-the-art methods, with execution time reduced by up to 3.76× and compilation time accelerated by up to 216.9× across various NISQ applications. Furthermore, PowerMove extends naturally to the fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) setting, where physical qubits are replaced by logical qubits encoded in QEC codes, achieving a 4.78× reduction in execution time. These results highlight PowerMove’s impact on both near-term NISQ applications and long-term FTQC implementations. We have open-sourced our codes at https://github.com/Scarlett0815/PowerMove to facilitate further research and collaboration within the community.