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arXiv:1806.03263 · Quantum Science and Technology

Hard limits on the postselectability of optical graph states

Jeremy C. Adcock, Sam Morley-Short, Joshua W. Silverstone, Mark G. Thompson

Published Nov 28, 2018• 22 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Coherent control of large entangled graph states enables a wide variety of quantum information processing tasks, including error-corrected quantum computation. The linear optical approach offers excellent control and coherence, but today most photon sources and entangling gates—required for the construction of large graph states—are probabilistic and rely on postselection. In this work, we provide proofs and heuristics to aid experimental design using postselection. We introduce a versatile design rule for postselectable experiments: drawn as a graph, with qubit as vertices and gates and photon-pair sources as edges, an experiment may only contain cycles with an odd number of sources. We analyse experiments that use photons from postselected photon-pair sources, and lower bound the number of accessible classes of graph state entanglement in the non-degenerate case—graph state entanglement classes that contain a tree are are always accessible. The proportion of graph states accessible by postselection shrinks rapidly, however. We list accessible classes for various resource states up to 9 qubits. Finally, we apply these methods to near-term multi-photon experiments.

DOI
10.1088/2058-9565/aae950

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Abstract Coherent control of large entangled graph states enables a wide variety of quantum information processing tasks, including error-corrected quantum computation. The linear optical approach offers excellent control and coherence, but today most photon sources and entangling gates—required for the construction of large graph states—are probabilistic and rely on postselection. In this work, we provide proofs and heuristics to aid experimental design using postselection. We introduce a versatile design rule for postselectable experiments: drawn as a graph, with qubit as vertices and gates and photon-pair sources as edges, an experiment may only contain cycles with an odd number of sources. We analyse experiments that use photons from postselected photon-pair sources, and lower bound the number of accessible classes of graph state entanglement in the non-degenerate case—graph state entanglement classes that contain a tree are are always accessible. The proportion of graph states accessible by postselection shrinks rapidly, however. We list accessible classes for various resource states up to 9 qubits. Finally, we apply these methods to near-term multi-photon experiments.
Graph states are central resources for quantum information processing, supporting applications in computation, communication, and error correction. In photonic systems, they are typically assembled from smaller entangled states using probabilistic fusion gates, which demand many photons and suffer from low success rates. We present an optimized scheme for directly generating caterpillar graph states (CGSs)—essential resource states for constructing high-dimensional lattice graph states—using only single-photon sources, linear optics, and heralded measurements. Based on the linear quantum graph (LQG) picture, our method produces CGSs efficiently. For CGSs of length l ≥ 3 , it requires l − 2 fewer photons and achieves a success rate 2 l − 2 times higher than fusion-based approaches. These results demonstrate that the LQG picture provides a powerful and flexible route to generating complex photonic graph states for efficient quantum information processing.
Since linear-optical two-photon gates are inherently probabilistic, measurement-based implementations are particularly well suited for photonic platforms: a large highly-entangled photonic resource state, called a graph state, is consumed through measurements to perform a computation. The challenge is thus to produce these graph states. Several generation procedures, which use either interacting quantum emitters or efficient spin-photon interface, have been proposed to create these photonic graph states deterministically. Yet, these solutions are still out of reach experimentally since the state-of-the-art is the generation of a linear graph state. Here, we introduce near-deterministic solutions for the generation of graph states using the current quantum emitter capabilities. We propose hybridizing quantum-emitter-based graph state generation with all-photonic fusion gates to produce graph states of complex topology near-deterministically. Our results should pave the way towards the practical implementation of resource-efficient quantum information processing, including measurement-based quantum communication and quantum computing.
Entangled multi-photon graph states are a crucial resource in photonic quantum computation and communication, yet the lack of photon-photon interactions makes their construction especially challenging. Typically, these graph states are produced through probabilistic single-photon sources and linear-optics entangling operations that require indistinguishable photons. The resulting inefficiency of these methods necessitates a large overhead in the number of sources and operations, creating a major bottleneck in the photonic approach. Harnessing single-atom-based photonic operations enables deterministic generation of photonic graph states, while also lifting the requirement for photon indistinguishability.
We show how general linear optical quantum entanglement experiments with probabilistic sources can be described using graph theory. By introducing complex weights in undirected graphs, we can naturally work with quantum superpositions. This immediately leads to many interesting results, some of which we present here. Firstly, we identify a conceptually new and experimentally completely unexplored method to solve classically intractable problems with quantum experiments. The problem is in the complexity class #P-complete, and deals with the computation of a generalization of the matrix function Permanent. Second, we show that a recent no-go result applies generally to linear optical quantum experiments, thus revealing important insights to quantum state generation with current photonic technology. Third, we show how to easily understand in a graphical way quantum experiments such as entanglement swapping. This connection offers a novel perspective on a widely used technology, and immediately raises many new questions.
Heralded multipartite entanglement is a key resource for various quantum information tasks. However, designing linear optical circuits that generate specific target states is generally challenging due to the complexity of the required optical structures. Here we formulate the design of heralded photonic circuits as an algorithmic graph-search problem. Our framework enables the automated construction and optimization of heralded photonic circuits by substantially reducing the search space using the linear quantum graph (LQG) picture. Our strategy reconstructs circuit structures as graphs in the picture and identifies suitable graphs automatically. As a result, we design efficient schemes for a broad range of useful multipartite resource states, including hypergraph magic states, quantum error correcting codes, general three-qubit states and length-1 caterpillar graph states. Our work establishes an algorithmic framework for the systematic discovery of heralded resource states, laying the foundation for the automated design of increasingly complex multipartite entangled resources.
Abstract Quantum emitter-based schemes for the generation of photonic graph states offer a promising, resource-efficient methodology for realizing distributed quantum computation and communication protocols on near-term hardware. We present a heralded scheme for making photonic graph states that is compatible with the typically poor photon collection from state-of-the-art coherent quantum emitters. We demonstrate that the construction time for large graph states can be polynomial in the photon collection efficiency, as compared to the exponential scaling of current emitter-based schemes, which assume deterministic photon collection. The additional overhead here consists of an extra spin qubit plus one additional spin-spin entangling gate per photon added to the graph. While the proposed scheme requires both non-demolition measurement and efficient storage of photons in order to generate graph states for arbitrary applications, we show that many useful tasks, including measurement-based quantum computation, can be implemented without these requirements. As a use case of our scheme, we construct a protocol for secure two-party computation that can be implemented efficiently on current hardware. Estimates of the fidelity to produce graph states used in the computation are given assuming current and near-term fidelities for highly coherent quantum emitters.