The promise of tremendous computational power, coupled with the development of robust error-correcting schemes, has fuelled extensive efforts to build a quantum computer. The requirements for realizing such a device are confounding: scalable quantum bits (two-level quantum systems, or qubits) that can be well isolated from the environment, but also initialized, measured and made to undergo controllable interactions to implement a universal set of quantum logic gates. The usual set consists of single qubit rotations and a controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate, which flips the state of a target qubit conditional on the control qubit being in the state 1. Here we report an unambiguous experimental demonstration and comprehensive characterization of quantum CNOT operation in an optical system. We produce all four entangled Bell states as a function of only the input qubits' logical values, for a single operating condition of the gate. The gate is probabilistic (the qubits are destroyed upon failure), but with the addition of linear optical quantum non-demolition measurements, it is equivalent to the CNOT gate required for scalable all-optical quantum computation.
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.