3

I was recently reading about how Xanadu made a scalable, room-temperature-operating quantum computer using photons as qubits (see this link). It said that in the logic gates, it entangles two photons at some point, and in the video it just looks like two fiber-optic cables brought really close together with photons going through them. Could somebody please go more in-depth about how that works? I'm also having trouble understanding quantum logic gates (I understand classical ones though) so if somebody here would explain those that would be great.

Thanks in advance!

glS
  • 27,510
  • 7
  • 37
  • 125
Blue Herring
  • 133
  • 3

1 Answers1

8

QML researcher at Xanadu here.

Our X-series chip produce entangled states by squeezing light and then combining it at beam splitters: those 'cables' are waveguides in a chip, which when they are close enough they allow tunnelling between them and effectively couple those two modes.

Note that the squeezing is necessary in this case (for example, had we used laser light, which is coherent, the beam splitters would 'mix' it but without producing any entanglement).

Ziofil
  • 196
  • 4