A blueprint for fault-tolerant quantum computation with Rydberg atoms

We present a blueprint for building a fault-tolerant universal quantum computer with Rydberg atoms. Our scheme, which is based on the surface code, uses individually-addressable optically-trapped atoms as qubits and exploits electromagnetically induced transparency to perform the multi-qubit gates required for error correction and computation. We discuss the advantages and challenges of using Rydberg atoms to build such a quantum computer, and we perform error correction simulations to obtain an error threshold for our scheme. Our findings suggest that Rydberg atoms are a promising candidate for quantum computation, but gate fidelities need to improve before fault-tolerant universal quantum computation can be achieved.