Design of an Apparatus for Continuous Large-Scale Neutral Atom Arrays

Neutral atom registers are sensitive to resonant light scattered during atomic cloud formation or cooling and to collisions with residual gases, limiting the lifetime and coherent operation of the array. Crucially, sustaining the large qubit numbers required for Quantum Error Correction (QEC) necessitates a transition from pulsed loading to continuous replenishment, ensuring the register population and coherence are actively maintained throughout arbitrarily long algorithms. To overcome this bottleneck, we present the design of a next-generation experiment using two angled optical conveyor belts to transport a large reservoir of Rb atoms over approximately 40 cm, breaking the line of sight between the MOT and the array. This spatial separation facilitates differential pumping for extreme high vacuum (XHV) in the science region glass cell (<10^-12 mbar) designed to yield long vacuum lifetimes (>1000 s) while simultaneously suppressing scattering crosstalk. The setup will aim at the operation of a large array of N > 10,000 atoms by exploiting the large FOV of custom-made objective lenses. By replenishing atom registers in real-time, continuous operation enables digital processors to execute arbitrarily long quantum error corrected sequences and allows analog simulators to operate at higher duty cycles. We will present the experimental design and the current status of the implementation.