End-to-end switchless architecture for fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing

Abstract

Photonics represents one of the most promising approaches to large-scale quantum computation with millions of qubits and billions of gates, owing to the potential for room-temperature operation, high clock speeds, miniaturization of photonic circuits, and repeatable fabrication processes in commercial photonic foundries. We present an end-to-end architecture for fault-tolerant continuous variable (CV) quantum computation using only passive on-chip components that can produce photonic qubits above the fault tolerance threshold with probabilities above 90%, and encodes logical qubits using physical qubits sampled from a distribution around the fault tolerance threshold. By requiring only low photon number resolution, the architecture enables the use of high-bandwidth photodetectors in CV quantum computing. Simulations of our qubit generation and logical encoding processes show a Gaussian cluster squeezing threshold of 12 dB to 13 dB. Additionally, we present a novel magic state generation protocol which requires only 13 dB of cluster squeezing to produce magic states with an order of magnitude higher probability than existing approaches, opening up the path to universal fault-tolerant quantum computation at less than 13 dB of cluster squeezing.