Caltech/Oratomic Show Shor's Algorithm Needs Only ~10,000 Physical Qubits

A Caltech-led paper, alongside the spin-out Oratomic, shows Shor's algorithm against ECC-256 can run on as few as ~10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits - or ~26,000 in parallel mode for a roughly 10-day run. That is about 100x below prior neutral-atom estimates and two orders of magnitude under the ~1 million qubits typically cited for surface codes.

The breakthrough comes from high-rate qLDPC codes with ~30% encoding (about 1 logical qubit per 3.5 physical), paired with neutral-atom hardware that already runs at 6,100 coherent qubits today. Combined with Google's whitepaper - which needs only ~1,200 logical qubits - the two results sketch a credible CRQC that is far smaller and far closer in time than any prior analysis suggested.