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arXiv · 2208.13911

Programmable photonic integrated meshes for modular generation of optical entanglement links

Mark Dong·Matthew Zimmermann·David Heim·Hyeongrak Choi·Genevieve Clark·Andrew J. Leenheer·Kevin J. Palm·Alex Witte·Daniel Dominguez·Gerald Gilbert·Matt Eichenfield·Dirk Englund
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Abstract

Large-scale generation of quantum entanglement between individually controllable qubits is at the core of quantum computing, communications, and sensing. Modular architectures of remotely-connected quantum technologies have been proposed for a variety of physical qubits, with demonstrations reported in atomic and all-photonic systems. However, an open challenge in these architectures lies in constructing high-speed and high-fidelity reconfigurable photonic networks for optically-heralded entanglement among target qubits. Here we introduce a programmable photonic integrated circuit (PIC), realized in a piezo-actuated silicon nitride (SiN)-in-oxide CMOS-compatible process, that implements an N x N Mach-Zehnder mesh (MZM) capable of high-speed execution of linear optical transformations. The visible-spectrum photonic integrated mesh is programmed to generate optical connectivity on up to N = 8 inputs for a range of optically-heralded entanglement protocols. In particular, we experimentally demonstrated optical connections between 16 independent pairwise mode couplings through the MZM, with optical transformation fidelities averaging 0.991 +/- 0.0063. The PIC's reconfigurable optical connectivity suffices for the production of 8-qubit resource states as building blocks of larger topological cluster states for quantum computing. Our programmable PIC platform enables the fast and scalable optical switching technology necessary for network-based quantum information processors.

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Mark Dong, Matthew Zimmermann, David Heim, Hyeongrak Choi, Genevieve Clark, Andrew J. Leenheer, Kevin J. Palm, Alex Witte, Daniel Dominguez, Gerald Gilbert, Matt Eichenfield, Dirk Englund. 2022-08-29. Programmable photonic integrated meshes for modular generation of optical entanglement links. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41534-023-00708-6

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