Quantum information science has shown that computers which exploit the quantum nature of particles, namely quantum computers, can outperform contemporary computers in some computational tasks. The fundamental building blocks of a quantum computer are quantum logical gates and quantum bits (qubits). Previous research has shown that the optical approach to quantum computing is promising. However, linear optical quantum computing (LOQC) schemes require a huge amount of resource, which makes large scale LOQC impractical, and hence there have been renewed interests in nonlinear optical quantum computing schemes, where less resource is required. The performance of these quantum gates depends on the properties of the nonlinear media. However, requirements on some of the properties for high performance quantum gates are not fully known. This thesis intends to bridge this gap of knowledge and examines the necessary conditions on several types optical nonlinearities that are common in two-qubit quantum gates schemes. These types of nonlinearities are, namely two-photon absorption,
χ(2) nonlinearity and
χ(3) cross-Kerr nonlinearity. The two-photon absorption based quantum Zeno gate is modeled in this thesis. It is shown that for practical absorbers, the photon loss significantly lowers the quantum fidelity of the Zeno gate. Nevertheless, this thesis proposes to use the Zeno gate for fusing optical cluster states. With the best theoretical estimate of single photon loss in the absorbers, the Zeno gate can outperform linear optical schemes. This thesis also proposes to embed the Zeno gate in the teleportation-type of two-qubit gate, namely GC-Zeno gate, such that the success rate of the gate can be traded off for higher gate fidelity. The effect of some mode matching error and detector inefficiency on the GC-Zeno gate are also considered here. It is shown that the photon loss requirement as well as the mode matching requirement are both stringent for having a fault tolerant GC-Zeno gate. This thesis models some of the properties of a
χ(3) optical medium and explores how they affect the fidelity of the cross-Kerr nonlinearity based quantum gate. This thesis shows that for a cross-Kerr medium with fast time response but negligible wave dispersion, the medium would induce spectral entanglement between the input photons and this significantly lowers the fidelity of the quantum gate. Nevertheless, when the dispersion has a stronger effect than the time response, and if phase noise is negligible, it is possible to achieve a quantum gate with high fidelity. However, the noise is actually significant, and this thesis suggests that spectral filtering can be applied to prohibit the occurrence of the noise. The requirements on employing optical
χ(2) nonlinearity for quantum computing are also examined. This study models the spectral effects of a
χ(2) medium on its efficiency. It is shown in this thesis that since the Hamiltonian of the medium does not commute at different times, the unitary operation should be modeled by a Dyson series, which leads to undesired spectral entanglement that lowers the efficiency of the medium. However, in the case of periodical poling, the unitary operation can be modeled by a Taylor series, where under some phase matching conditions, the medium can have a high efficiency. Furthermore, this thesis proposes a Bell measurement scheme and a quantum gate scheme based on
χ(2) nonlinearity that can always outperform linear optics even when the nonlinearity strength is weak. In the case of sufficiently strong nonlinearity, a quantum gate with high success rate can be achieved. In summary, this thesis models some of the properties of two-photon absorbers,
χ(2) nonlinearity and
χ(3) nonlinearity, and shows that it is possible to achieve the conditions required for high performance quantum gates, however these conditions are experimentally challenging to meet.
By embedding an atom capable of electromagnetically induced transparency inside an appropriate photonic-crystal microcavity it may become possible to realize an optical nonlinearity that can impart a $\ensuremath{\pi}$-rad-peak phase shift in response to a single-photon excitation. Such a device, if it operated at high fidelity, would then complete a universal gate set for all-optical quantum computation. It is shown here that the causal, noninstantaneous behavior of any ${\ensuremath{\chi}}^{(3)}$ nonlinearity is enough to preclude such a high-fidelity operation. In particular, when a single-photon-sensitive ${\ensuremath{\chi}}^{(3)}$ nonlinearity has a response time that is much shorter than the duration of the quantum computer's single-photon pulses, essentially no overall phase shift is imparted to these pulses by cross-phase modulation. Conversely, when this nonlinearity has a response time that is much longer than this pulse duration a single-photon pulse can induce a $\ensuremath{\pi}$-rad overall phase shift through cross-phase modulation, but the phase noise injected by the causal, noninstantaneous response function precludes this from being a high-fidelity operation.
The weak nonlinear Kerr interaction between single photons and intense laser fields has been recently proposed as a basis for distributed optics-based solutions to few-qubit applications in quantum communication and computation. Here, we analyse the above Kerr interaction by employing a continuous-time multi-mode model for the input/output fields to/from the nonlinear medium. In contrast to previous single-mode treatments of this problem, our analysis takes into account the full temporal content of the free-field input beams as well as the non-instantaneous response of the medium. The main implication of this model, in which the cross-Kerr phase shift on one input is proportional to the photon flux of the other input, is the existence of phase noise terms at the output. We show that these phase noise terms will preclude satisfactory performance of the parity gate proposed by Munro et al (2005 New J. Phys. 7 137).
The self-Kerr interaction is an optical nonlinearity that produces a phase shift proportional to the square of the number of photons in the field. At present, many proposals use nonlinearities to generate photon-photon interactions. For propagating fields these interactions result in undesirable features such as spectral correlation between the photons. Here we engineer a discrete network composed of cross-Kerr interaction regions to simulate a self-Kerr medium. The medium has effective long-range interactions implemented in a physically local way. We compute the one- and two-photon
S matrices for fields propagating in this medium. From these scattering matrices we show that our proposal leads to a high-fidelity photon-photon gate. In the limit where the number of nodes in the network tends to infinity, the medium approximates a perfect self-Kerr interaction in the one- and two-photon regime.
Abstract. The weak nonlinear Kerr interaction between single photons and intense laser fields has been recently proposed as a basis for distributed optics-based solutions to few-qubit applications in quantum communication and computation. Here, we analyze the above Kerr interaction by employing a continuous-time multi-mode model for the input/output fields to/from the nonlinear medium. In contrast to previous single-mode treatments of this problem, our analysis takes into account the full temporal content of the free-field input beams as well as the non-instantaneous response of the medium. The main implication of this model, in which the cross-Kerr phase shift on one input is proportional to the photon flux of the other input, is the existence of phase noise terms at the output. We show that these phase noise terms will degrade the performance of the parity gate proposed by Munro, Nemoto, and Spiller [1].Continuous-time cross-phase modulation and quantum computation 2 1.
A second-order nonlinearity has been proposed as a way to perform a conditional phase gate between two photons. The process involves combining the two photons into a single one (parametric up-conversion) and subsequently splitting that one into two photons identical to the original ones (parametric down-conversion), except for an overall phase shift. We show here that, when the multimode nature of the initial photon wave packets is considered, this approach suffers from the same difficulties as the third-order (Kerr-based) methods: specifically, the final state of the photons is inevitably spectrally distorted and entangled. The maximum fidelity appears to be limited to
F<0.4 for a free-space configuration, but we find that this could theoretically be pushed to $F\ensuremath{\simeq}0.6$ if the nonlinear medium is placed in an optical cavity. We show analytically that this latter result is identical to what one would obtain from a third-order nonlinear medium in the same arrangement.