A Neutral Atom-Based Hybrid Classical-Quantum Approach for the Entanglement Routing Problem
Abstract
Efficient end-to-end entanglement distribution in quantum information networks requires routing under limited resources and fidelity constraints. We study entanglement routing as a fidelity-constrained unsplittable multicommodity flow problem that maximizes the number of admitted requests. As a proof of concept, we integrate neutral-atom quantum optimization into a hybrid classical--quantum column-generation framework. A classical restricted master problem selects routes, while a pricing problem generates fidelity-feasible paths. We formulate this NP-hard constrained shortest-path pricing problem as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem and address it with hardware-aware register embedding and instance-driven pulse shaping. To our knowledge, this is the first study of neutral-atom quantum optimization as a pricing oracle for fidelity-constrained entanglement routing. On small benchmark instances evaluated with neutral-atom processor emulators, the method, combined with warm-start and post-processing, achieves an optimality gap below 1% across all tested sizes; the selected simulated-annealing route-generation baseline exhibits gaps of up to 6%. These results indicate that the generated bitstrings can provide useful candidate routes for classical refinement within column generation. This proof of concept does not establish quantum utility or scalability; further evaluation on larger instances, against stronger classical baselines, and on quantum hardware is needed.
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BibTeX
@misc{naghmouchi2026neutral,
title = {{A Neutral Atom-Based Hybrid Classical-Quantum Approach for the Entanglement Routing Problem}},
author = {M. Yassine Naghmouchi and Quentin Ma and Agathe Blaise and René Veyland and Wesley Coelho},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.37900},
eprint = {2609.37900},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37900},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A Neutral Atom-Based Hybrid Classical-Quantum Approach for the Entanglement Routing Problem
AU - M. Yassine Naghmouchi
AU - Quentin Ma
AU - Agathe Blaise
AU - René Veyland
AU - Wesley Coelho
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/29
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.37900
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37900
AB - Efficient end-to-end entanglement distribution in quantum information networks requires routing under limited resources and fidelity constraints. We study entanglement routing as a fidelity-constrained unsplittable multicommodity flow problem that maximizes the number of admitted requests. As a proof of concept, we integrate neutral-atom quantum optimization into a hybrid classical--quantum column-generation framework. A classical restricted master problem selects routes, while a pricing problem generates fidelity-feasible paths. We formulate this NP-hard constrained shortest-path pricing problem as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem and address it with hardware-aware register embedding and instance-driven pulse shaping. To our knowledge, this is the first study of neutral-atom quantum optimization as a pricing oracle for fidelity-constrained entanglement routing. On small benchmark instances evaluated with neutral-atom processor emulators, the method, combined with warm-start and post-processing, achieves an optimality gap below 1% across all tested sizes; the selected simulated-annealing route-generation baseline exhibits gaps of up to 6%. These results indicate that the generated bitstrings can provide useful candidate routes for classical refinement within column generation. This proof of concept does not establish quantum utility or scalability; further evaluation on larger instances, against stronger classical baselines, and on quantum hardware is needed.
ER -