Deterministic generation of a cluster state of entangled photons


  Ido Schwartz[1]  ,  Dan Cogan[1]  ,  Emma R. Schmidgall[1,2]  ,  Yaroslav Don[1]  ,  Liron Gantz[1]  ,  Oded Kenneth[1]  ,  Netanel H. Lindner[1]  ,  David Gershoni[1]  
[1] Physics Department and Solid State Institute, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, 32000 Haifa, Israel.
[2] Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.

Photonic cluster states are a resource for quantum computation based solely on single-photon measurements. We use semiconductor quantum dots to deterministically generate long strings of polarization-entangled photons in a cluster state by periodic timed excitation of a precessing matter qubit. In each period, an entangled photon is added to the cluster state formed by the matter qubit and the previously emitted photons. In our prototype device, the qubit is the quantum dot confined dark exciton, and it produces strings of hundreds of photons in which the entanglement persists over five sequential photons. The measured process map characterizing the device has a fidelity of 0.81 with that of an ideal device. Further feasible improvements of this device may reduce the resources needed for optical quantum information processing.  [I. Schwartz et al, Science 354, 434 (2016)    and   H. J. Briegel, Science 354, 416 (2016)]