Reconfigurable Four-Photon Interference among Three Nodes on a Field Deployed Metropolitan Fiber Network
Advanced quantum networking protocols beyond bi-photon, point-to-point links rely critically on the ability to perform multi-photon interference across multiple nodes under realistic operating conditions. Yet experimental validation of such higher-order, multi-node interference effects in deployed metropolitan fiber networks remains limited. Here, we report a field demonstration of polarization-controlled reconfigurable four-photon interference over three distant nodes on a deployed metropolitan fiber network. Using a fully fiber-coupled linear-optical platform, we observe a fusion-type four-photon interference signature in presence of real-world impairments, including photon loss, polarization drift, and timing uncertainty. By performing polarization-resolved measurements on two locally retained photons, we conditionally select distinct two-photon coincidence channels that exhibit Bell-like and N00N-like behavior. Rather than pursuing multi-partite entanglement verification, this work focuses on establishing the technical feasibility of multi-photon, multi-node interference and reconfigurable conditional state preparation in the field in a deployed fiber network environment. These results serve as a systems-level validation toward future multi-photon, multi-node quantum networking architectures that require robust interference performance outside the laboratory.