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arXiv:1910.10141 · Physical Review A

Universal programmable photonic architecture for quantum information processing

Ben Bartlett, Shanhui Fan

Published Apr 20, 2020• 28 citations
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Abstract

We present a photonic integrated circuit architecture for a quantum programmable gate array (QPGA) capable of preparing arbitrary quantum states and operators. The architecture consists of a lattice of phase-modulated Mach-Zehnder interferometers, which perform rotations on path-encoded photonic qubits, and embedded quantum emitters, which use a two-photon scattering process to implement a deterministic controlled-${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{z}$ operation between adjacent qubits. By appropriately setting phase shifts within the lattice, the device can be programmed to implement any quantum circuit without hardware modifications. We provide algorithms for exactly preparing arbitrary quantum states and operators on the device, and we show that gradient-based optimization can train a simulated QPGA to automatically implement highly compact approximations to important quantum circuits with near-unity fidelity.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.101.042319

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We introduce a novel parameterization of complex unitary matrices, which allows for the efficient photonic implementation of arbitrary linear discrete unitary operators. The proposed architecture is built on factorizing an N×NN \times NN×N unitary matrix into interlaced discrete fractional Fourier transforms and NNN-parameter diagonal phase shifts. We show that such a configuration can represent arbitrary unitary operators with N+1N+1N+1 phase layers. We discuss a gradient-based algorithm for finding the optimal phase parameters for implementing a given unitary matrix. By increasing the number of phase layers beyond the critical value of N+1N+1N+1, the optimization consistently converges faster as the system becomes over-determined. We propose an integrated photonic circuit realization of this architecture with coupled waveguide arrays and reconfigurable phase modulators. The proposed architecture can pave the way for developing novel families of programmable photonic circuits for optical classical and quantum information processing.
A software platform for quantum computing is required to run a complex algorithm on a real quantum device through automatically converting a quantum circuit level algorithm to a control sequence of target device. Moreover, the software platform must be tailored for the target quantum system by exploiting the properties of qubits and gates. In this work, we show how to implement a software platform for a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) platform with path-encoded photon qubits and quantum gates realized by means of interference in a mesh of tuneable Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs). For universal and programmable quantum computing, the software platform consists of three standard modules: decomposer, mapper, and controller. To verify the software we runs example circuit through software and hardware integration platform and confirm each module generates correct output. Also the validation is done by comparing two results for conventionally used manual way and the software supported automatic way. These two points ensure that the implemented software works correctly when applied to the PIC.
As quantum photonic hardware scales toward computationally relevant sizes, energy consumption has emerged as a key constraint. Programmable photonic integrated circuits, composed of interferometer meshes with tunable phase modulators, provide a flexible platform for quantum information processing using both qubits and qudits. In this work, we analyze the energetic cost of such devices by focusing on arbitrary quantum state preparation, a resource-intensive task central to quantum simulation and information processing. Using a common hardware, we benchmark qudit-based implementations, gate-based quantum computation, and measurement-based quantum computation. We find that while qudit encodings are attractive at small scale, their footprint and reconfiguration costs grow rapidly with system size, whereas qubit-based approaches incur significant overhead from entangling operations, feedforward, and reprogramming. Across all paradigms, scaling beyond a few tens of qubits renders either the energy consumption or the total preparation time prohibitive on fully programmable PICs. Our results highlight the need for optimized, task-specific photonic architectures to enable energy-efficient scaling.
Programmable photonic quantum processors face a critical challenge: despite significant advances in quantum state preparation and manipulation, measurements remain limited to projective techniques. Here, we demonstrate a programmable measurement processor that overcomes this limitation by enabling arbitrary quantum measurements within a scalable circuit framework. Our large-scale integrated photonic architecture achieves precise coherent control of ancillary quantum systems, realizing a universal four-dimensional quantum measurement device. We benchmark the processor by performing measurement tomography on 100 randomly selected measurements, achieving an average fidelity of 97.7%. The processor's performance exceeds the theoretical limits of projective measurements in three key quantum information tasks: state discrimination (with 23 times lower error), state estimation (with 10.6% higher fidelity), and randomness generation (with 37% more randomness yield), demonstrating its high operational quality. This work establishes a fully programmable quantum measurement processor, advancing the development of universal quantum operations for photonic quantum information processing by providing the key missing component.