Nonlinear photonic architecture for fault-tolerant quantum computing

Abstract

We propose a novel architecture for fault-tolerant quantum computing that incorporates strong single-photon nonlinearities into a photonic GHZ-measurement-based architecture. The nonlinearities substantially reduce resource overheads compared to conventional linear-optics-based architectures, which require significant redundancy to accommodate probabilistic photon generation and probabilistic entangling operations. By removing linear-optical failure modes, our nonlinear architecture can also tolerate much higher optical losses than linear approaches, with a baseline loss tolerance of $\sim$12\% using a 32-photon resource state and a foliated surface code. Our results show how introducing a nonlinear primitive enables dramatic improvements in practical implementations of fault-tolerant quantum computing.