Linear Optical Logical Bell State Measurements with Optimal Loss-Tolerance Threshold

Quantum threshold theorems impose hard limits on the hardware capabilities to process quantum information. We derive tight and fundamental upper bounds to loss-tolerance thresholds in different linear-optical quantum information processing settings through an adversarial framework, taking into account the intrinsically probabilistic nature of linear optical Bell measurements. For logical Bell state measurements—ubiquitous operations in photonic quantum information—we demonstrate analytically that linear optics can achieve the fundamental loss threshold imposed by the no-cloning theorem even though, following the work of Lee et al. [Phys. Rev. A 100, 052303 (2019)] the constraint was widely assumed to be stricter. We spotlight the assumptions of the latter publication and find their bound holds for a logical Bell measurement built from adaptive physical linear-optical Bell measurements. We also give an explicit even stricter bound for nonadaptive Bell measurements.7 MoreReceived 21 February 2023Revised 22 May 2023Accepted 22 September 2023DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.4.040322Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasIntegrated opticsQuantum communicationQuantum error correctionQuantum foundationsQuantum information theoryQuantum Information, Science & TechnologyAtomic, Molecular & Optical