飞秒激光直写光量子逻辑门

量子比特在同一时刻可处于所有可能状态上的叠加特性使得量子计算机具有天然的并行计算能力,在处理某些特定问题时具有超越经典计算机的明显优势.飞秒激光直写技术因其具有单步骤高效加工真三维光波导回路的能力,在制备通用型集成光量子计算机的基本单元—量子逻辑门中发挥着越来越重要的作用.本文综述了飞秒激光直写由定向耦合器构成的光量子比特逻辑门的进展.主要包括定向耦合器的功能、构成、直写和性能表征,集成波片、哈达玛门和泡利交换门等单量子比特逻辑门、受控非门和受控相位门等两量子比特逻辑门的直写加工,并对飞秒激光加工三量子比特逻辑门进行了展望.

Femtosecond laser direct writing of optical quantum logic gates

Unlike classical digital computers in which a bit can represent either 1 or 0 at any time, quantum computers use a two-level system, i.e., a qubit, to implement logical operations based on quantum mechanical laws, which can represent both values at once. Owing to the superposition property of qubits, quantum computers have natural parallel processing advantages and thus have potential to exceed the computational efficiency of classical computers for particular tasks. Quantum logic gates are the generalization of classical logic gates in computational networks. It has been proved that two-qubit quantum gates together with one-qubit quantum gates are adequate for constructing networks with any possible quantum computational property. Directional couplers are the most critical elementsfor constructing the quantum gates. In recent years, photonic quantum technologies have emerged as a promising experimental platform for quantum computing. Single photons have robust noise resistance, long coherence time, high transmission speed and great compatibility with other systems. They can be easily manipulated and encoded in any of several degrees of freedom, for example, polarization, path, spatial mode or time bin. Optical waveguide technology enables the realizing of complex optical schemes comprised of many elements with desired scalability, stability and miniaturization. Femtosecond laser direct writing of waveguide has been adopted as a powerful tool for integrated quantum photonics with characteristics of rapidness, cost-effectiveness, mask-less and single-step process. In particular, it has the ability to build arbitrary three-dimensional circuits directly inside bulk materials, which is impossible to achieve with conventional lithography. In this article we review the femtosecond laser writing and quantum characterization of directional coupler and important one-qubit and two-qubit optical quantum logic gates, such as Hadamard gate, Pauli-X gate, controlled-NOT gate, and controlled-Phase gate. The qubits in these gates are usually encoded through optical paths or polarizations of photons. The key to the realization of polarization-encoded one-qubit gates is to achieve flexible wave-plate operations, which is described in detail. Controlled-NOT gate and controlled-phase gate are the most crucial two-qubit gates in the linear optics computation and sometimes they can be converted into each other by adding some one-qubit gates or special superposition states. Many different kinds of waveguide circuits have been used to implement these two-qubit gates. The outlook and challenges for the femtosecond laser writing of three-qubit gates, such as Toffoli gate and Fredkin gate, are briefly introduced.