Transmission of photonic entangled states encoded via eigenstates of photon-number parity operator

Abstract

The transfer of quantum entangled states is of fundamental interest in quantum physics and plays an important role in quantum information processing, quantum communication, and quantum technology. Here, we propose a scheme to transfer quantum entangled states of two photonic qubits by utilizing four microwave cavities coupled to a superconducting qutrit (a three-level quantum system). The photonic qubits are encoded using two orthogonal eigenstates of the photon-number parity operator with eigenvalues ± 1, which allows for various encodings for the photonic qubits. The employment of four cavities at distinct frequencies effectively reduces the inter-cavity crosstalk. The utilization of only a single superconducting qutrit as the coupler significantly reduces the circuit resources. The entanglement transfer can be completed in just one step, making this scheme remarkably efficient. During the state transfer process, the third energy level of the coupler qutrit remains unoccupied, and thus decoherence from this level is diminished. Our numerical simulations demonstrate that within current circuit quantum electrodynamics technology, one can achieve high-fidelity transfer of the entangled states of two photonic qubits encoded via squeezed vacuum states and cat states. Our scheme possesses generality and can be applied to accomplish the same task in a variety of physical systems.