Experimental realization of universal high-dimensional quantum gates with ultra-high fidelity and efficiency

Abstract: Qudit, a high-dimensional quantum system, provides a larger Hilbert space to process the quantum information and has shown remarkable advantages over the qubit counterparts. It is a great challenge to realize the high fidelity universal quantum gates with qudits. Here we theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate a set of universal quantum gates for a single optical qudit with four dimensions (including the generalized Pauli $X_4$ gate, Pauli $Z_4$ gate, and all of their integer powers), which are encoded in the polarization-spatial degree of freedom without multiple unstable cascaded interferometers. Furthermore, we also realize the controlled-$X_4$ gate and all of its integer powers. We have achieved both the ultra-high average gate fidelity $99.73\%$ and efficiency $99.47\%$, which are above the the error threshold for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Our work paves a way for the large-scale high-dimensional fault-tolerant quantum computation with a polynomial resource cost.