Linear optical protocol for preparation of N-photon Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger state with conventional photon detectors

Abstract

We propose a linear optical protocol to generate Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) state of N distant photons with the certain success probability. The proposed setup involves simple linear optical elements, N pairs of the two-photon polarization entangled states, and the conventional photon detectors that only distinguish the vacuum and nonvacuum Fock number states. This makes the protocol more realizable in experiments.