High-fidelity and polarization insensitive universal photonic processors fabricated by femtosecond laser writing

Abstract

Universal photonic processors (UPPs) are fully programmable photonic integrated circuits that are key components in quantum photonics. With this work, we present a novel platform for the realization of low-loss, low-power and high-fidelity UPPs based on femtosecond laser writing (FLW) and compatible with a large wavelength spectrum. In fact, we demonstrate different UPPs, tailored for operation at 785 nm and 1550 nm, providing similar high-level performances. Moreover, we show that standard calibration techniques applied to FLW-UPPs result in Haar random polarization independent photonic transformations implemented with average amplitude fidelity as high as 0.9979 at 785 nm (0.9970 at 1550 nm), with the possibility of increasing the fidelity over 0.9990 thanks to novel optimization algorithms. Besides being the first demonstrations of polarization-transparent UPPs, these devices show the highest level of control and reconfigurability ever reported for a FLW circuit. These qualities will be greatly beneficial to applications in quantum information processing.

References in corpus (7)

• Quantum computational advantage using photons
• Femtosecond laser micromachining for integrated quantum photonics
• 20-Mode Universal Quantum Photonic Processor
• Thermal phase shifters for femtosecond laser written photonic integrated circuits
• Programmable photonic integrated meshes for modular generation of optical entanglement links
• Toward Higher Integration Density in Femtosecond-Laser-Written Programmable Photonic Circuits
• Characterization of multi-mode linear optical networks

Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Global calibration of large-scale photonic integrated circuits
• Variational approach to photonic quantum circuits via the parameter shift rule
• Semi-device independent characterization of multiphoton indistinguishability
• Laser-written reconfigurable photonic integrated circuit directly coupled to a single-photon avalanche diode array
• Demonstration of Hardware Efficient Photonic Variational Quantum Algorithm
• Experimental verification of Threshold Quantum State Tomography on a fully-reconfigurable photonic integrated circuit
• Variational quantum cloning machine on an integrated photonic interferometer
• Observation of Lie algebraic invariants in Quantum Linear Optics
• Effective programming of a photonic processor with complex interferometric structure
• Polarization based modulation of splitting ratio in femtosecond laser direct written directional couplers