The controlled quantum gate is an essential element for the realization of quantum computer and has been implemented in various types of two-level systems. However, high-dimensional controlled quantum gates are rarely investigated both theoretically and experimentally although high-dimensional quantum systems exhibit remarkable advantages over two-level systems for some of quantum information and computing tasks. Here we experimentally demonstrate the four-dimensional controlled X gate and its unique higher orders based on orbital-angular-momentum and polarization degrees of freedom of a single photon. The controlled gates have been examined with various input states, and all the conversion efficiency of the unitary operations are above 93% with 100% utility of photons. This work is an important step towards the goal of achieving arbitrary d-dimensional quantum circuit and paves a way for the implementation of quantum communication, computation in high-dimensional quantum systems.
The controlled quantum gate is an essential element for the realization of quantum computer and has been implemented in various types of two-level systems. However, high-dimensional controlled quantum gates are rarely investigated both theoretically and experimentally although high-dimensional quantum systems exhibit remarkable advantages over two-level systems for some of quantum information and computing tasks. Here we experimentally demonstrate the four-dimensional controlled X gate and its unique higher orders based on orbital-angular-momentum and polarization degrees of freedom of a single photon. The controlled gates have been examined with various input states, and all the conversion efficiency of the unitary operations are above 93% with 100% utility of photons. This work is an important step towards the goal of achieving arbitrary d-dimensional quantum circuit and paves a way for the implementation of quantum communication, computation in high-dimensional quantum systems.
Abstract Quantum gates are essential for the realization of quantum computer and have been implemented in various types of two-level systems. However, high-dimensional quantum gates are rarely investigated both theoretically and experimentally even that high-dimensional quantum systems exhibit remarkable advantages over two-level systems for some quantum information and quantum computing tasks. Here we experimentally demonstrate the four-dimensional X gate and its unique higher orders with the average conversion efficiency 93%. All these gates are based on orbital-angular-momentum degree of freedom (DoF) of single photons. Besides, a set of controlled quantum gates is implemented by use of polarization DoF. Our work is an important step toward the goal of achieving arbitrary high-dimensional quantum circuit and paves a way for the implementation of high-dimensional quantum communication and computation.
Optimizing the physical realization of quantum gates is important to build a quantum computer. Fredkin gate, also named controlled-swap gate, can be widely applicable in various quantum information processing schemes. In the present research, we propose and experimentally implement quantum Fredkin gate in a single-photon hybrid-degrees-of-freedom system. Polarization is used as the control qubit, and SWAP operation is achieved in a four-dimensional Hilbert space spanned by photonic orbital angular momentum. The effective conversion rate P of the quantum Fredkin gate in our experiment is (95.4±2.6)%. Besides, we find that a kind of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states can also be prepared by using our quantum Fredkin gate, and the Mermin inequality test shows its quantum contextual characteristic. Our experimental design paves the way for quantum computing and quantum fundamental study in high-dimensional and hybrid coding quantum systems.
Abstract Optimizing the physical realization of quantum gates is important to build a quantum computer. The controlled-SWAP gate, also named Fredkin gate, can be widely applicable in various quantum information processing schemes. In the present research, we propose and experimentally implement quantum Fredkin gate in a single-photon hybrid-degrees-of-freedom system. Polarization is used as the control qubit, and SWAP operation is achieved in a four-dimensional Hilbert space spanned by photonic orbital angular momentum. The effective conversion rate P of the quantum Fredkin gate in our experiment is (95.4 ± 2.6)%. Besides, we find that a kind of Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger-like states can be prepared by using our quantum Fredkin gate, and these nonseparale states can show its quantum contextual characteristic by the violation of Mermin inequality. Our experimental design and coding method are useful for quantum computing and quantum fundamental study in high-dimensional and hybrid coding quantum systems.
Unitary transformations are the fundamental building blocks of gates and operations in quantum information processing, allowing the complete manipulation of quantum systems in a coherent manner. In the case of photons, optical elements that can perform unitary transformations are readily available only for some degrees of freedom, e.g., wave plates for polarization. However, for high-dimensional states encoded in the transverse spatial modes of light, performing arbitrary unitary transformations remains a challenging task for both theoretical proposals and actual implementations. Following the idea of multi-plane light conversion, we show that it is possible to perform a broad variety of unitary operations at high quality by using only a few phase modulation planes. More importantly, we experimentally implement several high-dimensional quantum gates for up to five-dimensional states encoded in the full-field mode structure of photons. In particular, we realize cyclic and quantum Fourier transformations, known as Pauli X ^ -gates and Hadamard H ^ -gates, respectively, with an average visibility of more than 90%. In addition, we demonstrate near-perfect “unitarity” by means of quantum process tomography, unveiling a process purity of 99%. Last, we demonstrate the benefit of the two independent spatial degrees of freedom, i.e., azimuthal and radial, and implement a two-qubit controlled-NOT quantum operation on a single photon. Thus, our demonstrations open up new paths to implement high-dimensional quantum operations, which can be applied to various tasks in quantum communication, computation, and sensing schemes.
Qudit, a high-dimensional quantum system, can provide a larger Hilbert space, and it has been shown that the larger Hilbert space has remarkable advantages over the smaller one in quantum information processing. However, it is a great challenge to realize the high-fidelity quantum gates with qudits. Here we theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate the four-dimensional quantum gates (including the generalized Pauli X4 gate, Pauli Z4 gate, and all of their integer powers) with optical qudits based on the polarization-spatial degree of freedom of the single photon. Furthermore, we also realize the polarization-controlled eight-dimensional controlled-X4 gate and all of its integer powers. The experimental results achieve both the ultrahigh average gate fidelity 99.73 and efficiency 99.47, which are above the error threshold for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Our work paves the way for the large-scale high-dimensional fault-tolerant quantum computation with a polynomial resource cost.
Transformations on quantum states form a basic building block of every quantum information system. From photonic polarization to two-level atoms, complete sets of quantum gates for a variety of qubit systems are well known. For multilevel quantum systems beyond qubits, the situation is more challenging. The orbital angular momentum modes of photons comprise one such high-dimensional system for which generation and measurement techniques are well studied. However, arbitrary transformations for such quantum states are not known. Here we experimentally demonstrate a four-dimensional generalization of the Pauli X gate and all of its integer powers on single photons carrying orbital angular momentum. Together with the well-known Z gate, this forms the first complete set of high-dimensional quantum gates implemented experimentally. The concept of the X gate is based on independent access to quantum states with different parities and can thus be generalized to other photonic degrees of freedom and potentially also to other quantum systems.