English

PIQC: Scalable Distributed Quantum Computing via Photonic Integration of Designed Molecular Quantum Nodes

Quantum Physics 2026-05-21 v1

Abstract

There is a growing consensus that large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) necessitates high-fidelity photonic interconnects to overcome the scaling limits of monolithic architectures. However, most current platforms were not originally designed for native photonic connectivity and require significant engineering overhead. To overcome these fundamental hardware limitations, we recently introduced a rationally designed organic molecule that serves as an ideal quantum node, featuring a robust qubit-photon interface (QPI) and a long-lived nuclear-spin register. In this work, we present PIQC (Photonic Integrated Quantum Circuits), a distributed architecture designed to scale these molecular nodes into a functional quantum computer. The PIQC framework integrates five mutually reinforcing innovations: (i) Designer molecular qubits, i.e. carbene molecules in an isosteric host that provide millisecond-coherence electron spins with high spectral stability and spin-dependent optical emission, (ii) deterministic nuclear registers made of synthetically placed 13^{13}C or 14^{14}N labels that enable fast (1 μ\sim 1~\mus), high-fidelity electron-nuclear gates, (iii) hybrid photonic integration, which allows molecular films to seamlessly integrate with existing mature fabrication technologies, e.g. thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN), (iv) heralded entanglement protocols that can tolerate up to 70% photon loss, and (v) stairway Floquetification, i.e. high-rate quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes that are converted into Floquet codes, reducing syndrome extraction to weight-two Bell-pair measurements that match PIQC's networked hardware. PIQC offers a hardware-efficient, commercially viable pathway toward a utility-scale quantum computer based on distributed FTQC.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.21204,
  title  = {PIQC: Scalable Distributed Quantum Computing via Photonic Integration of Designed Molecular Quantum Nodes},
  author = {Anna Aubele and Gregor Bayer and Tim R. Eichhorn and Tobias Hahn and Fedor Jelezko and Paul Mentzel and Philipp Neumann and Matthias Pfender and Martin B. Plenio and Alex Retzker and Simon Roggors and Alon Salhov and Jochen Scharpf and Tobias A. Schaub and Nico Striegler and Thomas Unden and Julia Zolg and Sella Brosh and Ilai Schwartz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.21204},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

13 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:24:05.086Z