"The advantage of our approach is that it harnesses existing methods for generating large-scale cluster states," says RMIT research fellow Dr Nicolas Menicucci.
"Six beamsplitters and a few squeezed light sources give us the potential to access virtual optical networks of an immense size."
The researchers claim engineering interferometers that comprise hundreds or even thousands of optical elements is essential to implementing optical quantum computers.
"We found a new approach to dealing with this problem by drawing inspiration from quantum teleportation," says Dr Rafael Alexander from the University of Sydney.
"Measurement-based linear optics circumvents many of the challenges faced by conventional optics by using large virtual interferometers instead of physical ones,” he explains.
“By applying a specific sequence of measurements to a continuous-variable cluster state, the measurements themselves programme and implement the interferometer."
The technology has already been demonstrated, yielding cluster states composed of more than 1million entangled modes.
"Measurement-based linear optics has the potential to reshape how we think about the interference of light," concludes Dr Menicucci. "It ports the demonstrated scalability of continuous-variable cluster states to the broad range of linear-optics applications."
The paper also details a technique to overcome the usual noise by converting it into photon loss.
