Simulation of dissipative dynamics without interferometers

Developing techniques that reduce experimental complexity and minimize errors is of utmost importance for modeling quantum channels. In general, quantum simulators are focused on universal algorithms, whose practical implementation requires extra qubits necessary to control the quantum operations. In contrast, our technique focuses on minimizing the setup length required to implement the Kraus operators. These operators provide us with an experimentally simplified setup where only a degree of freedom is needed to implement any one-qubit quantum channel. Therefore, using entanglement-polarized photon pairs and post-processing techniques, we experimentally built the Kraus maps, carrying out unitary and projection operations.