Associate Professor Shuntaro Takeda and his colleagues have succeeded in developing a unique optical quantum computer that can perform various calculations with three optical pulses (equivalent to three qubits)putting information on them. They had proposed an original “large-scale optical quantum computer system” that can efficiently perform large-scale calculations with the smallest possible optical circuits, and had succeeded in developing a calculation circuit using a single optical pulse, which will be the heart of the system in 2021. This time, a small-scale prototype that can calculate with three optical pulses was completed and successfully demonstrated the principle. The method is highly scalable in terms of the number of optical pulses and versatile in terms of switching the calculation contents, and is expected to pave the way for a large-scale general-purpose optical quantum computer and accelerate the realization of a wide variety of optical quantum technologies. The paper was published in the online edition of Physical Review Letters on July 25.
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