All-optical quantum simulator of qubit noisy channels

Abstract

We suggest and demonstrate an all-optical quantum simulator for single-qubit noisy channels originating from the interaction with a fluctuating field. The simulator employs the polarization degree of freedom of a single photon, and exploits its spectral components to average over the realizations of the stochastic dynamics. As a proof of principle, we run simulations of dephasing channels driven either by Gaussian (Ornstein-Uhlenbeck) or non-Gaussian (random telegraph) stochastic processes.