Abstract

Linear optical quantum computing aims to harness the inherent advantages of photons, such as an absence of decoherence and speed-of-light travel, to manipulate quantum information that is encoded in some degree of freedom of the photon. It has been shown that passive optical elements such as beam-splitters, wave-plates and mirrors, together with the non-linearity in photon detection are sufficient to build an optical quantum computer. The major challenge in this area is development of a source that emits suitable input states. Although parametric down-conversion pair sources have achieved a number of impressive results in this area in recent years, their inherent poissionian pair statistics preclude scaling the systems to greater size.

© 2013 IEEE