Adaptive Phase Measurements in Linear Optical Quantum Computation

T. C. Ralph, A. P. Lund, H. M. Wiseman

Published 2005-07-20Version 1

Photon counting induces an effective nonlinear optical phase shift on certain states derived by linear optics from single photons. Although this no nlinearity is nondeterministic, it is sufficient in principle to allow scalable linear optics quantum computation (LOQC). The most obvious way to encode a qubit optically is as a superposition of the vacuum and a single photon in one mode -- so-called "single-rail" logic. Until now this approach was thought to be prohibitively expensive (in resources) compared to "dual-rail" logic where a qubit is stored by a photon across two modes. Here we attack this problem with real-time feedback control, which can realize a quantum-limited phase measurement on a single mode, as has been recently demonstrated experimentally. We show that with this added measurement resource, the resource requirements for single-rail LOQC are not substantially different from those of dual-rail LOQC. In particular, with adaptive phase measurements an arbitrary qubit state $\alpha \ket{0} + \beta\ket{1}$ can be prepared deterministically.