We report the first demonstration of a quantum Fredkin gate using linear optics. In addition to excellent performance in the logical basis, the gate can generate high-fidelity GHZ states and is used in small-scale algorithms.
One of the greatest challenges in modern science is the realisation of quantum computers which, as their scale increases, will allow enhanced performance of tasks across many areas of quantum information processing. Quantum logic gates play a vital role in realising these applications by carrying out the elementary operations on the qubits; a key aim is minimising the resources needed to build these gates into useful circuits. While the salient features of a quantum computer have been shown in proof-of-principle experiments, e.g., single- and two-qubit gates, difficulties in scaling quantum systems to encode and manipulate multiple qubits has hindered demonstrations of more complex operations. This is exemplified by the classical Fredkin (or controlled-SWAP) gate [1] for which, despite many theoretical proposals [2,3] relying on concatenating multiple two-qubit gates, a quantum analogue has yet to be realised. Here, by directly adding control to a two-qubit SWAP unitary [4], we use photonic qubit logic to report the first experimental demonstration of a quantum Fredkin gate [5]. Our scheme uses linear optics and improves on the overall probability of success by an order of magnitude over previous proposals [2,3]. This optical approach allows us to add control an arbitrary black-box unitary which is otherwise forbidden in the standard circuit model [6]. Additionally, the action of our gate exhibits quantum coherence allowing the generation of the highest fidelity three-photon GHZ states to date. The quantum Fredkin gate has many applications in quantum computing, quantum measurements [7] and cryptography [8,9]. Using our scheme, we apply the Fredkin gate to the task of direct measurements of the purity and state overlap of a quantum system [7] without recourse to quantum state tomography.
Implementation of quantum logic gates with linear optical elements plays a prominent role in quantum computing due to the relatively easier manipulation and realization. We present efficient schemes to implement controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate and controlled-swap (Fredkin) gate by solely using linear optics. We encode the control qubits and target qudits in photonic polarization (two-level) and spatial degrees of freedom (d-level), respectively. Based on the hybrid encoding, CNOT and Fredkin gates are constructed in a deterministic way without any borrowed ancillary photons or measurement-induced nonlinearities. Remarkably, the number of linear optics required to implement a CNOT gate has been reduced to one polarization beam splitter (PBS), while only d PBSs are necessary to implement a generalized Fredkin gate. The optical depths of all schemes are reduced to one and dimension-independent. Besides, the fidelity of our three-qubit Fredkin gate is higher than 99.7\% under realistic conditions, which is higher than the previous schemes.
Implementation of quantum logic gates with linear optical elements plays a prominent role in quantum computing due to their relatively easy manipulation and realization. We present efficient schemes to implement controlled-not (cnot) gates and controlled-swap (Fredkin) gates by using solely linear optics. We encode the control qubits and target qudits in photonic polarization (two-level) and spatial degrees of freedom (d level), respectively. On the basis of the hybrid encoding, cnot and Fredkin gates are constructed in a deterministic way without any borrowed ancillary photons or measurement-induced nonlinearities. Remarkably, the number of linear optics required to implement a cnot gate has been reduced to one polarizing beam splitter, while only d polarizing beam splitters are necessary to implement a generalized Fredkin gate. The optical depths of all schemes are reduced to 1 and and are dimension independent. Besides, the fidelity of our three-qubit Fredkin gate is higher than 99.7% under realistic conditions, which is higher than in previous schemes.