Programmable photonic state fusion via heralded storage of asynchronously generated resources

Abstract

Probabilistic photonic sources generate elementary states in different trials, whereas multiphoton protocols require them to interfere in common temporal modes. We propose a fusion protocol that overcomes this mismatch by successively loading independently heralded photonic states into active storage loops. Conditioning on vacuum in monitored dump modes selects events in which each newly generated state is transferred into the same circulating modes as the photons already stored, thereby removing its generation time label. Provided the two alternatives of each elementary state undergo the same loading transformation, the accumulated state is described by a product of programmable linear factors, allowing a target superposition to be constructed by polynomial factorization. Adjusting the storage loop coupling as the state grows substantially improves the loading efficiency, changing the faster-than-exponential penalty of fixed balanced couplers to exponential scaling. We apply the protocol to two-photon path--frequency states for photonic clock interferometry and estimate the detected rate including source waiting time and round-trip loss.