Demonstration of a quantum C-NOT gate in a time-multiplexed fully reconfigurable photonic processor

Abstract The two-qubit controlled-not (C-NOT) gate is an essential component for gate-based quantum circuits. In fact, its operation, combined with single qubit rotations allows to realise any quantum circuit. Several strategies have been adopted in order to build quantum gates. Among them, photonics offers the dual advantage of excellent isolation from the environment and ease of manipulation at the single qubit level. Here we adopt a scalable time-multiplexed approach in order to build a fully reconfigurable architecture capable of implementing a post-selected C-NOT gate with a fidelity of (93.8 ± 1.4)%. We then show how our time-multiplexed platform can be employed to combine a C-NOT and a single qubit gate in order to generate the four Bell states.