Why I am optimistic about the silicon-photonic route to quantum computing

By Terry Rudolph. 2016

373 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This is a short overview explaining how building a large-scale, silicon-photonic quantum computer has been reduced to the creation of good sources of 3-photon entangled states (and may simplify further). Given such sources, each photon needs to pass through a small, constant, number of components, interfering with at most 2 other spatially nearby photons, and current photonics engineering has already demonstrated the manufacture of thousands of components on two-dimensional semiconductor chips with performance that, once scaled up, allows the creation of tens of thousands of photons entangled in a state universal for quantum computation. At present the fully integrated, silicon-photonic architecture we envisage involves creating the required entangled states by starting with single-photons produced non-deterministically by pumping silicon waveguides (or cavities) combined with on-chip filters and nanowire superconducting detectors to herald that a photon has been produced. These sources are multiplexed in...

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9dc3f1c7362e389c67d437a29e425d143730e39c

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Citations in the corpus

Blueprint for a Scalable Photonic Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computer (2020, methodology): “The second type of architectures includes the schemes developed for the cat-basis encoding [4, 21], the GKP encoding [22, 23], and the dual-rail encoding [24].”
The physics of optical computing (2023, background): “In this Perspective article, we limit ourselves to discussing classical optical computing and do not review the benefits of optics for building quantum computers 43 .”
Photonic quantum information processing: A concise review (2019, background): “320 In summary, in the span of less than two decades, photonic quantum information science has matured immensely.”
t|ket⟩: a retargetable compiler for NISQ devices (2020, background): “Superconducting and ion-trap-based quantum processors are now available from multiple commercial companies [10–14], while other technologies such as photonics are not far behind [15, 16].”
Integrated photonic quantum technologies (2019, methodology): “Si-based MZIs with a 65dB on-off ratio has been achieved with near-perfect beamsplitters [41], equivalent to having a Pauli-Z error rate of < 10−6 [42].”
Quantum circuits with many photons on a programmable nanophotonic chip (2021, background): “tonics as a platform for advancing the frontier of quantum computation [26].”
Quantum internet: A vision for the road ahead (2018, background): “That being said, theory research (102) in this direction is likely to yield more insights, and experimental progress may bring such schemes closer to reality in the future.”