The concept of parity-time (PT) symmetry originates from the framework of quantum mechanics, where if the Hamiltonian operator satisfies the commutation relation with the parity and time operators, it shows all real eigen-energy spectrum. Recently, PT symmetry was introduced into optics, electronic circuits, acoustics, and so many other classical fields to further study the dynamics of the Hamiltonian and the energy of the system. Focusing on the dynamical evolution of the quantum state under the action of PT symmetric Hamiltonian, here we experimentally demonstrated the general dynamical evolution of a two-level system under the PT symmetric Hamiltonian using single-photon system. By enlarging the system using ancillary qubits and encoding the subsystem under the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian with post-selection, the evolution of the state can be observed with a high fidelity when the successfully parity-time symmetrically evolved subspace is solely considered. Owing to the effectively operation of the dilation method, our work provides a route for further exploiting the exotic properties of PT symmetric Hamiltonian for quantum simulation and quantum information processing.
We present a novel method to realize a multi-target-qubit controlled phase gate with one microwave photonic qubit simultaneously controlling $n-1$ target microwave photonic qubits. This gate is implemented with $n$ microwave cavities coupled to a superconducting flux qutrit. Each cavity hosts a microwave photonic qubit, whose two logic states are represented by the vacuum state and the single photon state of a single cavity mode, respectively. During the gate operation, the qutrit remains in the ground state and thus decoherence from the qutrit is greatly suppressed. This proposal requires onl…
We present the novel embodiment of a photonic qubit that makes use of one continuous spatial degree of freedom of a single photon and relies on the the parity of the photon's transverse spatial distribution. Using optical spontaneous parametric downconversion to produce photon pairs, we demonstrate the controlled generation of entangled-photon states in this new space. Specifically, two Bell states, and a continuum of their superpositions, are generated by simple manipulation of a classical parameter, the optical-pump spatial parity, and not by manipulation of the entangled photons themselves.…
We report on the realization and verification of quantum entanglement between an NV electron spin qubit and a telecom-band photonic qubit. First we generate entanglement between the spin qubit and a 637 nm photonic time-bin qubit, followed by photonic quantum frequency conversion that transfers the entanglement to a 1588 nm photon. We characterize the resulting state by correlation measurements in different bases and find a lower bound to the Bell state fidelity of F = 0.77 +/- 0.03. This result presents an important step towards extending quantum networks via optical fiber infrastructure.
We theoretically investigate the problem of localization control of few-photon states in driven-dissipative parity-symmetric photonic molecules. We show that a quantum feedback loop can utilize the information of the spontaneously-emitted photons from each cavity to induce asymmetric photon population in the system, while maintaining a balanced pump that respects parity symmetry. To better understand the system's behaviour, we characterize the degree of asymmetry as a function of the coupling between the two optical cavities. Contrary to intuitive expectations, we find that in some regimes the…
A scheme for heralded generation of frequency-bin photonic qubits via spontaneous four-wave mixing in a system of coupled microring resonators (photonic molecule) is developed so that the qubit state is fully controlled by the frequency amplitude of the pump field. It is shown that coupling parameters of the photonic molecule can be optimized to provide generation of nearly pure heralded photons. The heralded qubit state does not depend on the microring resonator mode frequency, thereby allowing to take advantage of frequency multiplexing for improving efficiency of quantum information process…
Entanglement between light and matter combines the advantage of long distance transmission of photonic qubits with the storage and processing capabilities of atomic qubits. To distribute photonic states efficiently over long distances several schemes to encode qubits have been investigated -- time-bin encoding being particularly promising due to its robustness against decoherence in optical fibers. Here, we demonstrate the generation of entanglement between a photonic time-bin qubit and a single collective atomic spin excitation (spin-wave) in a cold atomic ensemble, followed by the mapping of…
Multi-qubit parity measurements are essential to quantum error correction. Current realizations of these measurements often rely on ancilla qubits, a method that is sensitive to faulty two-qubit gates and which requires significant experimental overhead. We propose a hardware-efficient multi-qubit parity measurement exploiting the bifurcation dynamics of a parametrically driven nonlinear oscillator. This approach takes advantage of the resonator's parametric oscillation threshold which is a function of the joint parity of dispersively coupled qubits, leading to high-amplitude oscillations for …
We consider the direct three-qubit parity measurement scheme with two measurement resonators, using circuit quantum electrodynamics to analyze its functioning for several different types of superconducting qubits. We find that for the most common, transmon-like qubit, the presence of additional qubit-state dependent coupling terms of the two resonators hinders the possibility of performing the direct parity measurement. We show how this problem can be solved by employing the Tunable Coupling Qubit (TCQ) in a particular designed configuration. In this case, we effectively engineer the original …
The combination of quantum teleportation and quantum memory of photonic qubits is essential for future implementations of large-scale quantum communication and measurement-based quantum computation. Both steps have been achieved separately in many proof-of-principle experiments, but the demonstration of memory-built-in teleportation of photonic qubits remains an experimental challenge. Here, we demonstrate teleportation between photonic (flying) and atomic (stationary) qubits. In our experiment, an unknown polarization state of a single photon is teleported over 7 m onto a remote atomic qubit …
We perform generalized measurements of a qubit by realizing the qubit as a coin in a photonic quantum walk and subjecting the walker to projective measurements. Our experimental technique can be used to realize photonically any rank-1 single-qubit positive operator-valued measure via constructing an appropriate interferometric quantum-walk network and then projectively measuring the walker's position at the final step.
We present a scheme for a projective measurement of the parity operator $P_z=\prod_{i=1}^N σ_z^{(i)}$ of $N$-qubits. Our protocol uses a single ancillary qubit, or a probe qubit, and involves manipulations of the total spin of the $N$ qubits without requiring individual addressing. We illustrate our protocol in terms of an experimental implementation with atomic ions in a two-zone linear Paul trap, and further discuss its extensions to several more general cases.
Parity measurement is a key step in many entanglement generation and quantum error correction schemes. We propose a protocol for non-destructive parity measurement of two remote qubits, i.e., macroscopically separated qubits with no direct interaction. The qubits are instead dispersively coupled to separate resonators that radiate to shared photodetectors. The scheme is deterministic in the sense that there is no fundamental bound on the success probability. Compared to previous proposals, our protocol addresses the scenario where number resolving photodetectors are available but the qubit-res…
We show that optically active coupled quantum dots embedded in a superconducting microwave cavity can be used to realize a fast quantum interface between photonic and transmon qubits. Single photon absorption by a coupled quantum dot results in generation of a large electric dipole, which in turn ensures efficient coupling to the microwave cavity. Using cavity parameters achieved in prior experiments, we estimate that bi-directional microwave-optics conversion in nanosecond timescales with efficiencies approaching unity is experimentally feasible with current technology. We also outline a prot…
We generate and study the entanglement properties of novel states composed of three polarisation-encoded photonic qubits. By varying a single experimental parameter we can coherently move from a fully separable state to a maximally robust W state, while at all times preserving an optimally robust, symmetric entanglement configuration. We achieve a high fidelity with these configurations experimentally, including the highest reported W state fidelity.
We report an experimental realization of an atomic vapor quantum memory for the photonic po- larization qubit. The performance of the quantum memory for the polarization qubit, realized with electromagnetically-induced transparency in two spatially separated ensembles of warm Rubidium atoms in a single vapor cell, has been characterized with quantum process tomography. The process fidelity better than 0.91 for up to 16 μs of storage time has been achieved.
We investigate the properties of parity-time symmetric periodic photonic structures using Heesh-Shubnikov group theory. Classical group theory cannot be used to categorize the symmetry of the eigenmodes because the time-inversion operator is antiunitary. Fortunately, corepresentations of Heesh-Shubnikov groups have been developed to characterize the effect of antiunitary operators on eigenfunctions. Using the example structure of a one-dimensional photonic lattice, we identify the corepresentations of eigenmodes at both low and high symmetry points in the photonic band diagram. We find that th…
We present an optical filter that transmits photon pairs only if they share the same horizontal or vertical polarization, without decreasing the quantum coherence between these two possibilities. Various applications for entanglement manipulations and multi-photon qubits are discussed.
Quantum communication technologies show great promise for applications ranging from the secure transmission of secret messages to distributed quantum computing. Due to fiber losses, long-distance quantum communication requires the use of quantum repeaters, for which there exist quantum memory-based schemes and all-photonic schemes. While all-photonic approaches based on graph states generated from linear optics avoid coherence time issues associated with memories, they outperform repeater-less protocols only at the expense of a prohibitively large overhead in resources. Here, we consider using…
We present an efficient way of heralding photonic qubit signals using linear optics devices. First we show that one can obtain asymptotically perfect heralding and unit success probability with growing resources. Second, we show that even using finite resources, we can improve qualitatively and quantitatively over earlier heralding results. In the latte r scenario, we can obtain perfect heralded photonic qubits while maintaining a finite success probability. We demonstrate the advantage of our heralding scheme by predicting key rates for device independent quantum key distribution, taking impe…
An electromagnetic field quadrature measurement, performed on one of the modes of the nonlocal single-photon state $a|1,0>-b|0,1>$, collapses it into a superposition of the single-photon and vacuum states in the other mode. We use this effect to implement remote preparation of arbitrary single-mode photonic qubits conditioned on observation of a preselected quadrature value. The quantum efficiency of the prepared qubit can be higher than that of the initial single photon.
We have performed a proof-of-principle experiment in which qubits encoded in the polarization states of single-photons from a parametric down-conversion source were coherently stored and read-out from a quantum memory device. The memory device utilized a simple free-space storage loop, providing a cyclical read-out that could be synchronized with the cycle time of a quantum computer. The coherence of the photonic qubits was maintained during switching operations by using a high-speed polarizing Sagnac interferometer switch.
Photonic circuits in which stateful components are coupled via guided electromagnetic fields are natural candidates for native implementation of iterative stochastic algorithms based on propagation of information around a graph. Conversely, such message passing algorithms suggest novel circuit architectures for signal processing and computation that are well matched to nanophotonic device physics. Here we construct and analyze a quantum optical model of a photonic circuit for iterative decoding of a class of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes called expander codes. Our circuit can be unders…
A parity measurement on two qubits, each consisting of a single atom in a cavity, can be realized by measuring the phase shift of a probe beam, which interacts sequentially with the two qubits, but imperfections lead to decoherence within the subspaces of a given parity. We demonstrate that a different setup, where the probe light interacts repeatedly with the qubits, can reduce the rate of decoherence within the odd or the even parity subspace significantly. We consider both the case of a resonant and the case of a nonresonant light-atom interaction and find that the performance is comparable…
We demonstrate fast two-qubit gates using a parity-violated superconducting qubit consisting of a capacitively-shunted asymmetric Josephson-junction loop under a finite magnetic flux bias. The second-order nonlinearity manifesting in the qubit enables the interaction with a neighboring single-junction transmon qubit via first-order inter-qubit sideband transitions with Rabi frequencies up to 30~MHz. Simultaneously, the unwanted static longitudinal~(ZZ) interaction is eliminated with ac Stark shifts induced by a continuous microwave drive near-resonant to the sideband transitions. The average f…
We study the entanglement evolution of photonic orbital angular momentum qubit states with opposite azimuthal indices $l_0$, in a weakly turbulent atmosphere. Using asymptotic methods, we deduce analytical expressions for the amplitude of turbulence-induced crosstalk between the modes $l_0$ and $-l_0$. Furthermore, we analytically establish distinct, universal entanglement decay laws for Kolmogorov's turbulence model and for two approximations thereof.
We show that a beam splitter of reflectivity one-third can be used to realize a quantum phase gate operation if only the outputs conserving the number of photons on each side are post-selected.
Integrated optics is an engineering solution proposed for exquisite control of photonic quantum information. Here we use silicon photonics and the linear combination of quantum operators scheme to realise a fully programmable two-qubit quantum processor. The device is fabricated with readily available CMOS based processing and comprises four nonlinear photon-sources, four filters, eighty-two beam splitters and fifty-eight individually addressable phase shifters. To demonstrate performance, we programmed the device to implement ninety-eight various two-qubit unitary operations (with average qua…
We propose a quantum noise eater for a single qubit and experimentally verify its performance for recovery of a superposition carried by a dual-rail photonic qubit. We consider a case when only one of the rails (e.g., one of interferometric arms) is vulnerable to noise. A coherent but randomly arriving photon penetrating into this single rail causes a change of its state, which results in an error in a subsequent quantum information processing. We theoretically prove and experimentally demonstrate a conditional full recovery of the superposition by this quantum noise eater.
We study a quantum computing system using microwave photons in transmission line resonators on a superconducting chip as qubits. We show that all control necessary for quantum computing can be implemented by coupling to Josephson devices on the same chip, and take advantage of their strong inherent nonlinearities to realize qubit interactions. We analyze the gate error rate to demonstrate that our scheme is realistic even for Josephson devices with limited decoherence times. A conceptually innovative solution based on existing technologies, our scheme provides an integrated and scalable approa…
Eigenstate-preserving multi-qubit parity measurements lie at the heart of stabilizer quantum error correction, which is a promising approach to mitigate the problem of decoherence in quantum computers. In this work we explore a high-fidelity, eigenstate-preserving parity readout for superconducting qubits dispersively coupled to a microwave resonator, where the parity bit is encoded in the amplitude of a coherent state of the resonator. Detecting photons emitted by the resonator via a current biased Josephson junction yields information about the parity bit. We analyse theoretically the measur…
Recently, Pryde et al reported the demonstration of a quantum non-demolition scheme for single-photon polarization states with linear optics and projective measurements [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 190402 (2004)]. Here, we argue that their interpretation of the experiment is inconsistent with the fidelity measure they use.
We demonstrate heralded qubit amplification for Time-Bin and Fock-state qubits in an all-fibre, telecom-wavelength, scheme that highlights the simplicity, the stability and potential for fully integrated photonic solutions. Exploiting high-efficiency superconducting detectors, the gain, the fidelity and the performance of the amplifier are studied as a function of loss. We also demonstrate the first heralded Fock-state qubit amplifier without post-selection. This provides a significant advance towards demonstrating Device-Independent Quantum Key Distribution as well as fundamental tests of qua…
The future challenge of quantum communication are scalable quantum networks, which require coherent and reversible mapping of photonic qubits onto stationary atomic systems (quantum memories). A crucial requirement for realistic networks is the ability to efficiently store multiple qubits in one quantum memory. Here we demonstrate coherent and reversible mapping of 64 optical modes at the single photon level in the time domain onto one solid-state ensemble of rare-earth ions. Our light-matter interface is based on a high-bandwidth (100 MHz) atomic frequency comb, with a pre-determined storage …
We propose a deterministic and scalable scheme to construct a two-qubit controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate and realize entanglement swapping between photonic qubits using a quantum-dot (QD) spin in a double-sided optical microcavity. The scheme is based on spin selective photon reflection from the cavity and can be achieved in a nondestructive and heralded way. We assess the feasibility of the scheme and show that the scheme can work in both the weak coupling and the strong coupling regimes. The scheme opens promising perspectives for long-distance photonic quantum communication and distributed quantu…
We demonstrate the conditional reversal of a weak (partial-collapse) quantum measurement on a photonic qubit. The weak quantum measurement causes a nonunitary transformation of a qubit which is subsequently reversed to the original state after a successful reversing operation. Both the weak measurement and the reversal operation are implemented linear optically. The state recovery fidelity, determined by quantum process tomography, is shown to be over 94% for partial-collapse strength up to 0.9. We also experimentally study information gain due to the weak measurement and discuss the role of t…
When two equal photon-number states are combined on a balanced beam splitter, both output ports of the beam splitter contain only even numbers of photons. Consider the time-reversal of this interference phenomenon: the probability that a pair of photon-number-resolving detectors at the output ports of a beam splitter both detect the same number of photons depends on the overlap between the input state of the beam splitter and a state containing only even photon numbers. Here, we propose using this even-parity detection to engineer quantum states containing only even photon-number terms. As an …
To realize fault-tolerant quantum computing, it is necessary to store quantum information in logical qubits with error correction functions, realized by distributing a logical state among multiple physical qubits or by encoding it in the Hilbert space of a high-dimensional system. Quantum gate operations between these error-correctable logical qubits, which are essential for implementation of any practical quantum computational task, have not been experimentally demonstrated yet. Here we demonstrate a geometric method for realizing controlled-phase gates between two logical qubits encoded in p…
We analyze a direct parity measurement of the state of three superconducting qubits in circuit quantum electrodynamics. The parity is inferred from a homodyne measurement of the reflected/transmitted microwave radiation and the measurement is direct in the sense that the parity is measured without the need for any quantum circuit operations or for ancilla qubits. Qubits are coupled to two resonant cavity modes, allowing the steady state of the emitted radiation to satisfy the necessary conditions to act as a pointer state for the parity. However, the transient dynamics violates these condition…
One-step implementation of a multi-target-qubit controlled-phase gate with photonic qubits encoded via eigenstates of the photon-number parity operator
We present experimental schemes that allow to study the entanglement classes of all symmetric states in multiqubit photonic systems. In addition to comparing the presented schemes in efficiency, we will highlight the relation between the entanglement properties of symmetric Dicke states and a recently proposed entanglement scheme for atoms. In analogy to the latter, we obtain a one-to-one correspondence between well-defined sets of experimental parameters and multiqubit entanglement classes inside the symmetric subspace of the photonic system.
Protecting quantum information from errors is essential for large-scale quantum computation. Quantum error correction (QEC) encodes information in entangled states of many qubits, and performs parity measurements to identify errors without destroying the encoded information. However, traditional QEC cannot handle leakage from the qubit computational space. Leakage affects leading experimental platforms, based on trapped ions and superconducting circuits, which use effective qubits within many-level physical systems. We investigate how two-transmon entangled states evolve under repeated parity …
Single photons with tailored temporal profiles are a vital resource for future quantum networks. Here we distill them out of custom-shaped laser pulses that reflect from a single atom strongly coupled to an optical resonator. A subsequent measurement on the atom is employed to herald a successful distillation. Out of vacuum-dominated light pulses, we create single photons with fidelity $66(1)\%$, two-and-more-photon suppression $95.5(6)\%$, and a Wigner function with negative value $-0.125(6)$. Our scheme applied to state-of-the-art fiber resonators could boost the single-photon fidelity to up…
We report on the realization and application of non-destructive three-qubit parity measurements on nuclear spin qubits in diamond. We use high-fidelity quantum logic to map the parity of the joint state of three nuclear spin qubits onto an electronic spin qubit that acts as an ancilla, followed by single-shot non-destructive readout of the ancilla combined with an electron spin echo to ensure outcome-independent evolution of the nuclear spins. Through the sequential application of three such parity measurements, we demonstrate the generation of genuine multipartite entangled states out of the …
Integrated quantum photonics is an appealing platform for quantum information processing, quantum communication and quantum metrology. In all these applications it is necessary not only to be able to create and detect Fock states of light but also to program the photonic circuits that implements some desired logical operation. Here we demonstrate a reconfigurable controlled two-qubit operation on a chip using a multiwaveguide interferometer with a tunable phase shifter. We find excellent agreement between theory and experiment, with a 0.98 \pm 0.02 average similarity between measured and ideal…
A scheme based on electromagnetically induced transparency is used to store light in a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this process, a photonic polarization qubit is stored in atomic Zeeman states. The performance of the storage process is characterized and optimized. The average process fidelity is 1.000 +/- 0.004. For long storage times, temporal fluctuations of the magnetic field reduce this value, yielding a lifetime of the fidelity of 1.1 +/- 0.2 ms. The write-read efficiency of the pulse energy can reach 0.53 +/- 0.05.
We experimentally test invariance properties of the six-photonic-qubits generalization of a singlet state. Our results clearly corroborate with theory. The invariance properties are useful to beat some types of decoherence. We also experimentally detect entanglement in the state using an appropriate witness observable, composed of local observables. Our results clearly indicate that the tested setup, which is very stable, is a good candidate for realization of various multi-party quantum communication protocols. The estimated fidelity of the produced state is very high: it reveals very strong …
One of the biggest challenges in experimental quantum information is to keep the fragile superposition state of a qubit alive. Long lifetimes can be achieved for material qubit carriers as memories, at least in principle, but not for propagating photons that are rapidly lost by absorption, diffraction or scattering. The loss problem can be mitigated with a nondestructive photonic qubit detector that heralds the photon without destroying the encoded qubit. Such detector is envisioned to facilitate protocols where distributed tasks depend on the successful dissemination of photonic qubits, to im…
One of the greatest difficulties in the applications of single photon polarization states as qubits is the realization of controlled interactions between two photons. Recently, it has been shown that such interactions can be realized using only beam splitters and high efficiency photon detection by post-selecting a well defined part of the results in the output. We analyze these interactions and discuss schemes for qubit operations based on this mechanism.
The cross-Kerr nonlinearity (XKNL) effect can induce efficient photon interactions in principle with which photonic multiqubit gates can be performed using far fewer physical resources than linear optical schemes. Unfortunately, it is extremely challenging to generate giant cross-Kerr nonlinearities. In recent years, much effort has been made to perform multiqubit gates via weak XKNLs. However, the required nonlinearity strengths are still difficult to achieve in the experiment. We here propose an XKNL-based scheme for realizing a two-photon polarization-parity gate, a universal two-qubit gate…
Parity measurement is a central tool to many quantum information processing tasks. In this Letter, we propose a method to directly measure two- and four-qubit parity with low overhead in hard- and software, while remaining robust to experimental imperfections. Our scheme relies on dispersive qubit-cavity coupling and photon counting that is sensitive only to intensity; both ingredients are widely realized in many different quantum computing modalities. For a leading technology in quantum computing, superconducting integrated circuits, we analyze the measurement contrast and the back action of …
We propose and analyze a physical implementation of two-qubit parity measurements as required for continuous error correction, assuming a setup in which the individual qubits are strongly coupled to separate optical cavities. A single optical probe beam scatters sequentially from the two cavities and the continuous parity measurement is realized via fixed quadrature homodyne photo-detection. We present models based on quantum stochastic differential equations (QSDE's) for both an ideal continuous parity measurement and our proposed cavity quantum electrodynamics (cavity QED) implementation; a …
We investigate the decay properties of the quantumness including quantum entanglement, quantum discord and quantum coherence for two photonic qubits, which are partially entangled in their orbital angular momenta, through Kolmogorov turbulent atmosphere. It is found that the decay of quantum coherence and quantum discord may be qualitatively different from that of quantum entanglement when the initial state of two photons is not maximally entangled. We also derive two universal decay laws for quantum coherence and quantum discord, respectively, and show that the decay of quantum coherence is m…
