Demonstration of an all-optical quantum controlled-NOT gate

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an all-optical quantum CNOT gate, showing its ability to produce entangled states and its potential for scalable quantum computing with linear optics and quantum non-demolition measurements.

Contribution

It provides the first unambiguous experimental demonstration and detailed characterization of an optical quantum CNOT gate with implications for scalable quantum computing.

Findings

Successfully produced all four Bell states using the gate

Demonstrated the probabilistic nature of the optical CNOT

Showed the gate's potential for scalable quantum computation

Abstract

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.