Deterministic entangling gates with nonlinear quantum photonic interferometers

Abstract: The quantum computing paradigm in photonics currently relies on the multi-port interference in linear optical devices, which is intrinsically based on probabilistic measurements outcome and thus non-deterministic. Devising a fully deterministic, universal, and practically achievable quantum computing platform based on integrated photonic circuits is still an open challenge. Here we propose to exploit weakly nonlinear photonic devices to implement deterministic entangling quantum gates, following the definition of dual rail photonic qubits. It is shown that a universal set of single- and two-qubit gates can be designed by a suitable concatenation of few optical interferometric elements, with optimal fidelities arbitrarily close to 100% theoretically demonstrated through a bound constrained optimization algorithm. The actual realization would require the concatenation of a few tens of elementary operations, as well as on-chip optical nonlinearities that are compatible with some of the existing quantum photonic platforms, as it is finally discussed.