The heralded generation of entangled states underpins many photonic quantum technologies. As quantum error correction thresholds are determined by underlying physical noise mechanisms, a detailed and faithful characterization of resource states is required. Non-computational leakage, e.g. more than one photon occupying a dual-rail encoded qubit, is an error not captured by standard forms of state tomography, which postselect on photons remaining in the computational subspace. Here we use the continuous-variable (CV) formalism and first quantized state representation to develop a simulation framework that reconstructs photonic quantum states in the presence of partial distinguishability and resulting non-computational leakage errors. Using these tools, we analyze a variety of Bell state generation circuits and find that the five photon discrete Fourier transform (DFT) Bell state generation scheme [Phys Rev. Lett. 126 23054 (2021)] is most robust to such errors for near-ideal photons. Through characterization of a photonic entangling gate, we demonstrate how leakage errors prevent a modular characterization of concatenated gates using current tomographical procedures. Our work is a necessary step in revealing the true noise models that must be addressed in fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing architectures.
@article{arxiv.2305.08452,
title = {Errors in heralded circuits for linear optical entanglement generation},
author = {Reece D. Shaw and Alex E. Jones and Patrick Yard and Anthony Laing},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.08452},
year = {2023}
}