Integrated optics is an engineering solution proposed for exquisite control of photonic quantum information. Here we use silicon photonics and the linear combination of quantum operators scheme to realise a fully programmable two-qubit quantum processor. The device is fabricated with readily available CMOS based processing and comprises four nonlinear photon-sources, four filters, eighty-two beam splitters and fifty-eight individually addressable phase shifters. To demonstrate performance, we programmed the device to implement ninety-eight various two-qubit unitary operations (with average quantum process fidelity of 93.2±4.5%), a two-qubit quantum approximate optimization algorithm and efficient simulation of Szegedy directed quantum walks. This fosters further use of the linear combination architecture with silicon photonics for future photonic quantum processors.
@article{arxiv.1809.09791,
title = {Large-scale silicon quantum photonics implementing arbitrary two-qubit processing},
author = {Xiaogang Qiang and Xiaoqi Zhou and Jianwei Wang and Callum M. Wilkes and Thomas Loke and Sean O'Gara and Laurent Kling and Graham D. Marshall and Raffaele Santagati and Timothy C. Ralph and Jingbo B. Wang and Jeremy L. O'Brien and Mark G. Thompson and Jonathan C. F. Matthews},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.09791},
year = {2018}
}