Experimental Demonstration of Efficient High-dimensional Quantum Gates with Orbital Angular Momentum

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates high-dimensional quantum gates using orbital angular momentum of photons, achieving high efficiency and paving the way for advanced quantum communication and computation.

Contribution

It presents the first experimental realization of four-dimensional quantum gates with high efficiency using orbital angular momentum.

Findings

Achieved 93% average conversion efficiency for four-dimensional X gates.

Implemented controlled quantum gates using photon polarization.

Demonstrated the feasibility of high-dimensional quantum circuits.

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 of single photons. Besides, a set of controlled quantum gates is implemented by use of polarization degree of freedom. Our work is an important step towards the goal of achieving arbitrary high-dimensional quantum circuit and paves a way for the implementation of high-dimensional quantum communication and computation.