Ultra-High Vacuum (UHV)
Pressures below roughly 10⁻⁹ torr, emptier than low Earth orbit, so stray gas molecules can't knock atoms out of a trapped-ion or neutral-atom machine.
Ultra-high vacuum (UHV) means pressures below roughly 10⁻⁹ torr, fewer stray molecules per cubic centimeter than low Earth orbit. Trapped-ion and neutral-atom quantum computers need it because a single collision with a background gas molecule can knock an atom out of its trap or scramble its quantum state mid-computation.
Reaching UHV is a craft: stainless steel chambers baked for days to drive gas off the walls, copper gaskets, ion pumps, and a culture of fingerprint paranoia. Atom loss from background collisions is a real scaling constraint (it sets how long a neutral-atom array survives), so vacuum engineering quietly determines specs that get headlined as 'qubit count.'
It's also a Colorado specialty by inheritance: decades of NIST Boulder and JILA atomic physics built a local workforce that knows how to build an empty box better than almost anyone.