Todd Pittman, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
It has recently been shown that scalable two-qubit logic gates can be realized by forcing non-interacting qubits to behave as fermions in one part of a circuit, and bosons in another part. This new paradigm has important implications for quantum computing with single-photon qubits, where the nonlinearities needed for universal logic operations are difficult to achieve. In this talk, I will describe our ongoing experimental work aimed at demonstrating a photonic fermion-boson-type gate in a parametric down-conversion experiment that relies on anti-symmetric frequency entanglement, post-selection, and other techniques from the linear optics quantum computing toolbox. I will also discuss how strong two-photon absorption can be used to induce fermion-like behavior for photons, and describe our recent experimental work on realizing strong two-photon absorption using sub-wavelength diameter tapered optical fibers in Rubidium vapor.