3/4-efficient Bell measurement with passive linear optics and unentangled ancillae

Abstract

It is well known that an unambiguous discrimination of the four optically encoded Bell states is possible with a probability of $50\%$ at best, when using static, passive linear optics and arbitrarily many vacuum mode ancillae. By adding unentangled single-photon ancillae, we are able to surpass this limit and reach a success probability of at least $75\%$. We discuss the error robustness of the proposed scheme and a generalization to reach a success probability arbitrarily close to $100\%$.