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International Conference on Quantum Information

Integration of highly probabilistic sources into optical quantum architectures

Kae Nemoto, Simon J. Devitt, Ashley M. Stephens, William J. Munro

Published Jan 1, 2011• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We introduce a design for an optical computer constructed exclusively from a single quantum component. Unlike previous efforts we eliminate the need for on demand photon sources and detectors and replace them with the same device utilised to create photon/photon entanglement. This introduces highly probabilistic elements into the architecture while maintaining complete specificity of the structure and operation for a large scale computer.

DOI
10.1364/icqi.2011.qtuc2

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We introduce a design for an optical computer constructed exclusively from a single quantum component. Unlike previous efforts we eliminate the need for on demand photon sources and detectors and replace them with the same device utilised to create photon/photon entanglement. This introduces highly probabilistic elements into the architecture while maintaining complete specificity of the structure and operation for a large scale computer.
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In 2001, all-optical quantum computing became feasible with the discovery that scalable quantum computing is possible using only single-photon sources, linear optical elements, and single-photon detectors. Although it was in principle scalable, the massive resource overhead made the scheme practically daunting. However, several simplifications were followed by proof-of-principle demonstrations, and recent approaches based on cluster states or error encoding have dramatically reduced this worrying resource overhead, making an all-optical architecture a serious contender for the ultimate goal of a large-scale quantum computer. Key challenges will be the realization of high-efficiency sources of indistinguishable single photons, low-loss, scalable optical circuits, high-efficiency single-photon detectors, and low-loss interfacing of these components.
In this paper we provide a review of the perpetual optical topological quantum computer, a large scale quantum architecture utilising a single quantum component. We will examine the building block of this architecture, the photonic module, the original architecture design and a modified design which allows for the entire computer to be constructed solely from a single component. Given the extraordinary specificity of this design we can provide a pessimistic resource analysis, utilising deliberately bad circuit designs and arrangements to determine the size and speed of a large scale factoring engine.
Optical quantum computation was limited to a few photon applications such as quantum cryptography and partial teleportation until 2001. Then the possibility of performing arbitrary logic conditional on certain detection outcomes was introduced by Knill, Laflamme and Milburn ( Nature 2001 409 46). Simple circuits consisting of single photon sources, entangled pair sources, linear optical elements and high efficiency photon counting detectors can be used to develop probabilistic two-photon logic gates. Initially such gates show a low probability of success but can approach the success rate of deterministic (non-linear) logic at the cost of added complexity. These developments have led to the emergence of a novel field of research aimed at improving the efficiency of linear logic and developing the efficient sources and detectors for its implementation. This topical issue of Journal of Optics B: Quantum and Semiclassical Optics is devoted to recent advances in this field. Key to all linear optics gates is the interference effect between separate photons that have no previous history. In this issue we include the first experiment to show such an effect (Rarity et al ), on which many later experiments are based. These interference effects can then be used to entangle separate pairs of particles into higher order entangled states (Zou et al 2005 J. Opt. B: Quantum Semiclass. Opt. 7 119–121) and also to establish entanglement between matter qubits (Kok et al ). Quantum dot single photon sources suitable for linear optics quantum logic are discussed in the paper by Unitt et al while a waveguide source of pair photons is presented by Ducci et al . The difficulties in scaling linear optics quantum computing arise from the low success probabilities of the gates. Introducing a small amount of non-linearity could allow unit efficiency gates to be designed (Munro et al ) while large non-linearities generated by the collective effects in EIT could be used to implement a wide variety of quantum logic functions (Petrosyan). The development of algorithms suitable for optical implementation is addressed by Ellinas et al . Key contributors to this issue are collaborating in the project IST:38864 RAMBOQ which has a primary goal of developing linear optics computation tools and techniques.
We present photonic quantum computing architectures that can deal with both probabilistic (heralded) generation of single photons and probabilistic gates without making use of coherent switching. The only required dynamical element is the controllable absorption of all photons in a given mode. While the architectures in theory scale polynomially in the resources required for universal quantum computation, as presented their overhead is large and they are illustrative extreme points in the configuration space of photonic approaches, rather than a recipe that anybody should seriously pursue. They do, however, prove that many things presumed necessary for photonic quantum computing, in fact are not. Of potentially independent interest may be that the architectures make use of qubits which have many possible microstates corresponding to a single effective qubit state, and the technique for dealing with probabilistic operations is to, when necessary, just enlarge the set of such microstates to incorporate all possibilities, while making heavy use of the subsequent ability to `coherently erase' which particular microstate a given qubit is in.