Creating photonic GHZ and W states via quantum walk

Abstract

We propose schemes for preparing W and GHZ photonic states entangled in polarization via quantum walks, where the trajectory exchanging of identical photons plus postselection induces the coupling between their polarization degrees of freedom. Being different from the polarization beam splitter-based approach, the indistinguishability of identical photons provides an alternative for coupling photons, which is more phase stable and may induce richer actions than the traditional polarization beam splitter on input photons. Our schemes demonstrate that this new coupling mechanism for photons is originated from the fact that trajectory-exchanging operation plus postselection can extract entangled states from the initially product states, and this new coupling mechanism may find considerable potential applications in both quantum communication and quantum computation.