Efficient Fusion of Photonic W-states with Nonunitary Partial-swap Gates

Abstract: We introduce a nonunitary partial-swap gate for fusing arbitrary small-sized photonic W-states into a large-scale entangled network of W-state efficiently without ancillary photons. A partial-swap gate is designed in an optical architecture based on linear optics elements. By introducing auxiliary degree of freedom, this gate provides a higher success probability with less cost. Our implementation can create a larger target state with a simpler set-up than previous proposals for W-state fusion. Also all "garbage" states are recyclable, i.e., there is no complete failure output in our scheme in principle.