Deterministic and cascadable conditional phase gate for photonic qubits

Previous analyses of conditional φ[subscript nl]-phase gates for photonic qubits that treat cross-phase modulation (XPM) in a causal, multimode, quantum field setting suggest that a large (∼π rad) nonlinear phase shift is always accompanied by fidelity-degrading noise [J. H. Shapiro, Phys. Rev. A 73...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chudzicki, Christopher Alan, Shapiro, Jeffrey H., Chuang, Isaac L.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Physical Society 2014
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/88739
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7296-523X
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0997-2979
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6094-5861
Description
Summary:Previous analyses of conditional φ[subscript nl]-phase gates for photonic qubits that treat cross-phase modulation (XPM) in a causal, multimode, quantum field setting suggest that a large (∼π rad) nonlinear phase shift is always accompanied by fidelity-degrading noise [J. H. Shapiro, Phys. Rev. A 73, 062305 (2006); J. Gea-Banacloche, Phys. Rev. A 81, 043823 (2010)]. Using an atomic ∨ system to model an XPM medium, we present a conditional phase gate that, for sufficiently small nonzero φ[subscript nl], has high fidelity. The gate is made cascadable by using a special measurement, i.e., principal-mode projection, to exploit the quantum Zeno effect and preclude the accumulation of fidelity-degrading departures from the principal-mode Hilbert space when both control and target photons illuminate the gate. The nonlinearity of the ∨ system we study is too weak for this particular implementation to be practical. Nevertheless, the idea of cascading through principal-mode projection is of potential use to overcome fidelity-degrading noise for a wide variety of nonlinear optical primitive gates.