Boosted Bell-state measurements for photonic quantum computation

Fault-tolerant fusion-based photonic quantum computing (FBQC) greatly relies on entangling two-photon measurements, called fusions. These fusions can be realized using linear-optical projective Bell-state measurements (BSMs). These linear-optical BSMs are limited to a success probability of 50%, greatly reducing the performance of FBQC schemes. The performance of FBQC can be improved using boosting, thus achieving higher success probabilities by adding additional resources. Here, we realize a boosted BSM using a 4 × 4 multiport splitter and an additional entangled photon pair, allowing for a success probability of up to 75%. In our experiment, we obtain a success probability for our boosted BSM of (69.3 ± 0.3)%, clearly exceeding the 50% limit. We further demonstrate the significance of our boosted BSM for FBQC, showing a threefold increase in robustness to photon loss and a significant reduction of the logical error rates.