Optical Quantum Computing

Abstract

Under the label of optical quantum computing, there are a variety of protocols and experiments that use the quantum properties of light to achieve a computational advantage over classical computing machines. In this review, we describe some of the main implementations, which differ in the type of encoding and in how the computation is performed, whether using gates or cluster states. For each protocol, we describe advantages and challenges with an overview of the experimental results obtained, summarized in tables. Because of the great relevance achieved in this field, there is a section dedicated to non-universal quantum computation with photons, where boson sampling, variational quantum eigensolvers, and quantum machine learning applications are described. The aim is to give the reader the broadest overview of the applications where photons and their quantum properties play a key role in computation.