On Chip IntraSystem Quantum Entangled States Generator




 

Quantum Technologies Lab, LEONARDO –Finmeccanica Piazza MonteGrappa n.4 - 00195 Roma (ITALY)

Quantum technology is a fundamentally new way of harnessing Nature and it has potential for a truly revolutionary
innovation and promise the next generation of products with exciting and astounding properties that will affect our lives
profoundly. They will have a great influence in defence, aerospace, energy and telecommunications sectors. If this
process is to continue in the future, new, quantum technology must replace or supplement what we have now. In
particular, Quantum Information Technology can support entirely new modes of information processing based on so
called quantum bits or qubits. Its eventual impact may be as great as or greater than that of its classical predecessor.
There is almost daily progress in developing promising technologies for realizing quantum information processing with
various advantages over its classical counterpart. Logic gates and wires are becoming smaller, and soon they will be
made out of only a handful of atoms. Photons are unsurpassed as qubits in terms of decoherence times, mobility, and
achievability of high-fidelity single-qubit operations. Thus far, entanglement experiments in optics have been very
clean, and an optical quantum processor would obviously have an advantage in connecting to a quantum "network" (no
need to convert between stationary and flying qubits). All-optical quantum computing became feasible when, in 2001, a
breakthrough known as the KLM (Knill-Laflamme-Milburn) scheme showed that scalable quantum computing is
possible using only single-photon sources, detectors, and linear optical circuits. This scheme relies on quantum
interference with auxiliary photons at a beam splitter and single-photon detection to induce not-deterministic
interactions. Nowadays, the limits of the original KLM linear optics quantum computing proposal, as well as the more
recent cluster and graph-state approaches, in addition to various nonlinear optical approaches are explored, but several
challenges must be overcome. The most important issues are the practical scalability of quantum circuits, the ability to
perform quantum logic gates with error rates below the fault-tolerant threshold and their incorporation into large-scale
quantum circuits with realistic physical resources and single-photon detectors packed on an optical chip. Optical
integrated circuits offer great potential for realizing previously unfeasible large-scale quantum circuits. However, this
architecture suffers not only of the overhead of multiple sources, detectors and ancillary qubits, but it needs to maintain
the complete coherence between single photons in which qubits are encoded. The idea to reduce the overhead due to
multiple single photon sources with very high degree of reciprocal coherence exploits the possibility to encode the
whole state space in a complex optical circuit based on Multiple Rail (MR) Architecture: a particular state in input is
encoded in the quantum superposition of a coherent light beam trough the different waveguides, so that it is possible to
reproduce the mathematical and physical aspects of quantum entanglement in classical beams of light. Multiple Rail
Architecture provides the realization of so called Classical or, better, Intra-System Entanglement. In practics a
reconfigurable optical matrix of interconnected MachZehnder provides the representation of the complex Hilbert-
Schmidt space where the quantum operation lives. This integrated system on chip can be both Photonics and/or
Plasmonics. By exploiting this idea we are able to obtain all the universal quantum gates as SWAP, CNOT, CPHASE,
TOFFOLI for two qubits and for multiqubits cases. The most important goal is the possibility to perform deterministic
Bell measurements: in usual optical schemes the probability of success of Bell measurements is ½, while the novel
architecture provides the possibility to discriminate all Bell states, so that the teleportation can become completely
deterministic.

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978-1-5090-6736-7/17/$31.00 2017 European Union