Brown Engineering Ph.D. candidate Miles Miller-Dickson, along with Alan Bidart of Chemistry, collaborated with colleagues Alex Leonardi (Harvard), Marcelo Velasco Forest (Maryland) and Jeff Burka (Singularity Energy) to take first place in the QuEra challenge at MIT’s 2025 Quantum Hackathon last month.
Their specific project was based on creating quantum compilation strategies for zoned neutral atom architectures for quantum computation, optimizing how high-level quantum algorithms are run on these specific architectures at the physical instruction level.
MIT’s Interdisciplinary Quantum Information Science and Engineering (iQuISE) holds its 24-hour quantum competition each spring, drawing students, young professionals and sponsors from all around the world. More than 420 in-person participants (the hackathon’s largest turnout yet) were split into groups of five and assigned one of six different challenges. Miller-Dickson’s group, affectionately calling themselves the “Good Qubits,” joined the circuit optimization challenge managed by QuEra, a quantum computing startup known for its work in quantum computation using neutral atoms. The group implemented several circuits on QuEra’s new gate-based software development kit.
“QuEra’s challenge involved optimizing the implementation of several common quantum circuits, like error correction codes on neutral atom hardware,” said Bidart. “The optimization was across the quantum stack, from the high level circuit diagram to the low-level neutral atom movements, where the number of 2-qubit controlled-Z gates, atom movement, local gates, etc. were all minimized as much as possible. This was probably the most fun and invigorating challenge I have ever done at a hackathon.”
The challenge ran from 10 a.m. on a Saturday to 10 a.m. Sunday, where participants did math, wrote code, and turned in a working solution and slides for a presentation. The Good Qubits solution involved quantum information, graph coloring problems, and a lot of coding, both with established quantum computing libraries and a still unreleased alpha version of one of QuEra’s upcoming libraries to interface with their neutral atom architectures. After turning in the project, the presentation took place two hours later. The first place prize included a custom-designed model of a quantum computer made from LEGO® bricQs.
“As I wrap up my PhD, I’m very grateful to the Brown Quantum Initiative for supporting opportunities like this one,” said Miller-Dickson. “The number of Brown participants at this event has increased each year, and we really hope this trend continues.” The Brown Quantum Initiative, a hub for quantum science and engineering research at Brown, holds workshops and weekly seminars, and held its own hackathon last semester with IBM and the QC@Brown undergraduate group.