A chip-scale polarization-spatial-momentum quantum SWAP gate in silicon nanophotonics

Recent progress in quantum computing and networking enables high-performance large-scale quantum processors by connecting different quantum modules. Optical quantum systems show advantages in both computing and communications, and integrated quantum photonics further increases the level of scaling and complexity. Here we demonstrate an efficient SWAP gate that deterministically swaps a photon's polarization qubit with its spatial-momentum qubit on a nanofabricated two-level silicon-photonics chip containing three cascaded gates. The on-chip SWAP gate is comprehensively characterized by tomographic measurements with high fidelity for both single-qubit and two-qubit operation. The coherence preservation of the SWAP gate process is verified by single-photon and two-photon quantum interference. The coherent reversible conversion of our SWAP gate facilitates a quantum interconnect between different photonic subsystems with different degrees of freedom, demonstrated by distributing four Bell states between two chips. We also elucidate the source of decoherence in the SWAP operation in pursuit of near-unity fidelity. Our deterministic SWAP gate in the silicon platform provides a pathway towards integrated quantum information processing for interconnected modular systems.