High-fidelity controlled-phase gates for distinguishable quantum walkers via extended interactions

Abstract

We investigate the implementation of controlled-phase (CP) gates with quantum walks in a dual-rail encoding through the use of interacting particles. While previous proposals have focused on indistinguishable particles (bosons or fermions) to achieve unitary fidelity for plane-wave scattering, practical implementations require finite-size wavepackets and routing through single-particle gates, both factors that introduce unavoidable fidelity losses. We show that extending the interaction range beyond on-site or first-neighbor terms provides sufficient control over the scattering potential to engineer CP gates with distinguishable particles that match the ideal bosonic/fermionic performance. For finite Gaussian wavepackets, we derive analytical approximations for the gate fidelity in terms of the transmission coefficient's magnitude and phase derivatives. We find that while distinguishable-particle scattering alone exhibits slightly lower fidelity than the indistinguishable case, the overall architecture that we propose avoids the additional single-particle gates required for routing indistinguishable particles. The roundabout gates needed for the latter indeed introduce fidelity losses approximately one order of magnitude larger than the interaction-induced losses, making the distinguishable-particle approach competitive for practical implementations. Our results establish multi-neighbor interactions as a tool for quantum information processing with continuous-time quantum walks and provide quantitative guidelines for optimizing gate fidelities in finite-size systems.