All-photonic architectural roadmap for scalable quantum computing using Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states

Abstract

Linear optical quantum computing is beset by the lack of deterministic entangling operations besides photon loss. Motivated by advancements at the experimental front in deterministic generation of various kinds of multiphoton entangled states, we propose an architecture for linear-optical quantum computing that harnesses the availability of three-photon Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states. Our architecture and its subvariants use polarized photons in GHZ states, polarization beam splitters, delay lines, optical switches and on-off detectors. We concatenate topological quantum error correction code with three-qubit repetition codes and estimate that our architecture can tolerate remarkably high photon-loss rate of \(11.5 \%\); this makes a drastic change that is at least an order higher than those of known proposals. Further, considering three-photon GHZ states as resources, we estimate the resource overheads to perform gate operations with an accuracy of \(10^{-6}\)~(\(10^{-15}\)) to be \(2.0\times10^6~(5.6\times10^7)\). Compared to other all-photonic schemes, our architecture is also resource-efficient. In addition, the resource overhead can be even further improved if larger GHZ states are available. Given its striking enhancement in the photon loss threshold and the recent progress in generating multiphoton entanglement, our scheme will make scalable photonic quantum computing a step closer to reality.