A major challenge in practical quantum computation is the ineludible errors caused by the interaction of quantum systems with their environment. Fault-tolerant schemes, in which logical qubits are encoded by several physical qubits, enable correct ou
tput of logical qubits under the presence of errors. However, strict requirements to encode qubits and operators render the implementation of a full fault-tolerant computation challenging even for the achievable noisy intermediate-scale quantum technology. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the existence of the threshold in a special fault-tolerant protocol. Four physical qubits are implemented using 16 optical spatial modes, in which 8 modes are used to encode two logical qubits. The experimental results clearly show that the probability of correct output in the circuit, formed with fault-tolerant gates, is higher than that in the corresponding non-encoded circuit when the error rate is below the threshold. In contrast, when the error rate is above the threshold, no advantage is observed in the fault-tolerant implementation. The developed high-accuracy optical system may provide a reliable platform to investigate error propagation in more complex circuits with fault-tolerant gates.
Making a which-way measurement (WWM) to identify which slit a particle goes through in a double-slit apparatus will reduce the visibility of interference fringes. There has been a long-standing controversy over whether this can be attributed to an un
controllable momentum transfer. To date, no experiment has characterised the momentum change in a way that relates quantitatively to the loss of visibility. Here, by reconstructing the Bohmian trajectories of single photons, we experimentally obtain the distribution of momentum change, which is observed to be not a momentum kick that occurs at the point of the WWM, but nonclassically accumulates during the propagation of the photons. We further confirm a quantitative relation between the loss of visibility consequent on a WWM and the total (late-time) momentum disturbance. Our results emphasize the role of the Bohmian momentum in giving an intuitive picture of wave-particle duality and complementarity.
We experimentally demonstrate the nonlocal reversal of a partial-collapse quantum measurement on two-photon entangled state. Both the partial measurement and the reversal operation are implemented in linear optics with two displaced Sagnac interferom
eters, which are characterized by single qubit quantum process tomography. The recovered state is measured by quantum state tomography and its nonlocality is characterized by testing the Bell inequality. Our result will be helpful in quantum communication and quantum error correction.
By using photon pairs created in parametric down conversion, we report on an experiment, which demonstrates that measurement can recover the quantum entanglement of two qubit system in a pure dephasing environment. The concurrence of the final state
with and without measurement are compared and analyzed. Furthermore, we verify that recovered states can still violate Bells inequality, that is, to say, such recovered states exhibit nonlocality. In the context of quantum entanglement, sudden death and rebirth provide clear evidence, which verifies that entanglement dynamics of the system is sensitive not only to its environment, but also on its initial state.
