Femtosecond Laser Direct Writing of Integrated Photonic Quantum Chips for Generating Path-Encoded Bell States

Micromachines (Basel). 2020 Dec 15;11(12):1111. doi: 10.3390/mi11121111.

Abstract

Integrated photonic quantum chip provides a promising platform to perform quantum computation, quantum simulation, quantum metrology and quantum communication. Femtosecond laser direct writing (FLDW) is a potential technique to fabricate various integrated photonic quantum chips in glass. Several quantum logic gates fabricated by FLDW have been reported, such as polarization and path encoded quantum controlled-NOT (CNOT) gates. By combining several single qubit gates and two qubit gates, the quantum circuit can realize different functions, such as generating quantum entangled states and performing quantum computation algorithms. Here we demonstrate the FLDW of integrated photonic quantum chips composed of one Hadamard gate and one CNOT gate for generating all four path-encoded Bell states. The experimental results show that the average fidelity of the reconstructed truth table reaches as high as 98.8 ± 0.3%. Our work is of great importance to be widely applied in many quantum circuits, therefore this technique would offer great potential to fabricate more complex circuits to realize more advanced functions.

Keywords: CNOT gate; Hadamard gate; femtosecond laser direct writing; path-encoded Bell state; photonic quantum chip.