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arXiv · 2511.04648

Automated Discovery of Non-local Photonic Gates

Abstract

Interactions between quantum systems enable quantum gates, the building blocks of quantum information processing. In photonics, direct photon-photon interactions are too weak to be practically useful, so effective interactions are engineered with linear optics and measurement. A central challenge is to realize such interactions non-locally, i.e., between photons that remain spatially separated. We present experimental proposals for several essential non-local multiphoton quantum gates that act on spatially separated photons, in both qubit and high-dimensional qudit systems. All solutions were discovered by the AI-driven discovery system called PyTheus. Rather than using pre-shared entanglement or Bell state measurements, our gates use as a resource quantum indistinguishability by path identity - a technique that exploits coherent superpositions of the photon pair origins. While analyzing these solutions, we uncovered a new mechanism that mimics much of the properties of quantum teleportation, without shared entanglement or Bell state measurements. Technically, our results establish path indistinguishability as a practical resource for distributed quantum information processing; conceptually, they demonstrate how automated discovery systems can contribute new ideas and techniques in physics.

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Sören Arlt, Mario Krenn, Xuemei Gu. 2025-11-06. Automated Discovery of Non-local Photonic Gates. https://doi.org/10.1103/f415-kgwr

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