Robust architecture for programmable universal unitaries

Abstract: The decomposition of large unitary matrices into smaller ones is important, because it provides ways to realization of classical and quantum information processing schemes. Today, most of the methods use planar meshes of tunable two-channel blocks, however, the schemes turn out to be sensitive to fabrication errors. We study a novel decomposition method based on multi-channel blocks. We have shown that the scheme is universal even when the block`s transfer matrices are chosen at random, making it virtually insensitive to errors. Moreover, the placement of the variable elements can be arbitrary, so that the scheme is not bound to specific topologies. Our method can be beneficial for large-scale implementations of unitary transformations by techniques, which are not of wide proliferation today or yet to be developed.