Arbitrary photonic wave plate operations on chip: Realizing Hadamard, Pauli-X and rotation gates for polarisation qubits

Abstract

Chip-based photonic quantum computing is an emerging technology that promises much speedup over conventional computers at small integration volumes. Particular interest is thereby given to polarisation-encoded photonic qubits, and many protocols have been developed for this encoding. However, arbitrary wave plate operation on chip are not available so far, preventing from the implementation of integrated universal quantum computing algorithms. In our work we close this gap and present Hadamard, Pauli-X, and rotation gates of high fidelity for photonic polarisation qubits on chip by employing a reorientation of the optical axis of birefringent waveguides. The optical axis of the birefringent waveguide is rotated due to the impact of an artificial stress field created by an additional modification close to the waveguide. By adjusting this length of the defect along the waveguide, the retardation between ordinary and extraordinary field components is precisely tunable including half-wave plate and quarter-wave plate operations. Our approach demonstrates the full range control of orientation and strength of the induced birefringence and thus allows arbitrary wave plate operations without affecting the degree of polarisation or introducing additional losses to the waveguides. The implemented gates are tested with classical and quantum light.