Universal linear optics

By J. Carolan, C. Harrold, Chris Sparrow, E. Martin-Lopez, N. Russell, Joshua W. Silverstone, Peter Shadbolt, N. Matsuda, M. Oguma, M. Itoh and 6 more. Science, 2015

1,074 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Complex quantum optical circuitry Encoding and manipulating information in the states of single photons provides a potential platform for quantum computing and communication. Carolan et al. developed a reconfigurable integrated waveguide device fabricated in a glass chip (see the Perspective by Rohde and Dowling). The device allowed for universal linear optics transformations on six wave-guides using 15 integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometers, each of which was individually programmable. Functional performance in a number of applications in optics and quantum optics demonstrates the versatility of the device's reprogrammable architecture. Science, this issue p. 711; see also p. 696 A reconfigurable optical circuit provides a platform for a photonically-based quantum computer. [Also see Perspective by Rohde and Dowling] Linear optics underpins fundamental tests of quantum mechanics and quantum technologies. We demonstrate a single reprogrammable optical circuit that is sufficient to implement all possible linear optical protocols up to the size of that circuit. Our six-mode universal system consists of a cascade of 15 Mach-Zehnder interferometers with 30 thermo-optic phase shifters integrated into a single photonic chip that is electrically and optically interfaced for arbitrary setting of all phase shifters, input of up to six photons, and their measurement with a 12-single-photon detector system. We programmed this system to implement heralded quantum logic and entangling gates, boson sampling with verification tests, and six-dimensional complex Hadamards. We implemented 100 Haar random unitaries with an average fidelity of 0.999 ± 0.001. Our system can be rapidly reprogrammed to implement these and any other linear optical protocol, pointing the way to applications across fundamental science and quantum technologies.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/009e98d679ea67ae8b7a71f0ccd62b9b0eaae3ef

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Citations in the corpus

Almost-linear time decoding algorithm for topological codes (2017, background): “Experimental efforts have made rapid progress in recent years [3, 41, 2, 15, 34, 14, 36, 49, 48, 40], and may soon have the capabilities to demonstrate small-scale error correction.”
Silicon Quantum Photonics (2015, background): “The most complex quantum photonic device reported to date consists of 30 directional couplers enclosing 30 thermal tuners on 6 modes, etched into glass waveguides on a single 40 × 100 mm(2) die [66].”
Roadmap on optical security (2016, background): “Fabrication technology is progressing, in particular in nano-photonics, where low-loss 2D networks with tens of adjustable coupling elements have become possible [ 146 ] .”
Quantum computational advantage using photons (2020, methodology): “There have been various validation methods ( 51-54 ) proposed and related experiments ( 24-27,29-31, 44, 45, 55-58 ) to gather supporting or circumstantial evidence for the correct operations of the boson-samplers.”
Demonstration of a 4 × 4-port universal linear circuit (2016, methodology): “The design presented in[3] performs the reconfiguration by changing the parameters of the MZIs that constitute the circuit.”
Experimentally realized in situ backpropagation for deep learning in photonic neural networks (2022, methodology): “[14] Jacques Carolan, Christopher Harrold, Chris Sparrow, Enrique Martín-López, Nicholas J.”