At the premier conference in optical sciences, the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics, CLEO, held in the US 5-10’th May 2019 in San Jose, California, the tight collaboration between SPOC and the Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information (NSQI) at Bristol University, resulted in the acceptance of a highly prestigious and competitive postdeadline paper.
The paper contained the report of the first experimental demonstration of chip-to-chip teleportation of quantum states of light. The experiment shows that integrated quantum transceivers in silicon are able to prepare, manipulate, distribute and transceive quantum photonic states with high fidelity. Integrated silicon quantum photonics offers a compelling platform for quantum information processing with photons, having small device footprints and high performance optical components. In addition, the platform enables key quantum components such as single photon sources, single photon detectors and linear optical components. Moreover, compatibility with advanced CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) manufacturing processes allows the production of highly programmable and re-configurable quantum photonic circuits. In the paper presented at CLEO, the SPOC-NSQI researchers report on the inter-/intra-chip teleportation of single qubit states with high fidelity. This is delivered by developing a four-qubit quantum photonic device in silicon, with the inclusion of four state-of-the-art on-chip micro-ring resonator single-photon sources and high-fidelity optically linear multi-qubit operators. The achieved teleportation with an average fidelity of 91% is among one of the highest achieved so far, emphasising the ability for integrated silicon photonics to provide a practical platform for large-scale quantum information applications.