High-fidelity generation of four-photon GHZ states on-chip

Abstract

Mutually entangled multi-photon states are at the heart of all-optical quantum technologies. While impressive progresses have been reported in the generation of such quantum light states using free space apparatus, high-fidelity high-rate on-chip entanglement generation is crucial for future scalability. In this work, we use a bright quantum-dot based single-photon source to demonstrate the high fidelity generation of 4-photon Greenberg-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states with a low-loss reconfigurable glass photonic circuit. We reconstruct the density matrix of the generated states using full quantum-state tomography reaching an experimental fidelity to the target $|{\text{GHZ}}_4⟩$ of $\mathcal{F}_{\text{GHZ}_4} (86.0\pm0.4)\,\%$, and a purity of ${\mathcal{P}}_{{\text{GHZ}}_4}=(76.3\pm 0.6)\%$. The entanglement of the generated states is certified with a semi device-independent approach through the violation of a Bell-like inequality by more than 39 standard deviations. Finally, we carry out a four-partite quantum secret sharing protocol on-chip where a regulator shares with three interlocutors a sifted key with up to 1978 bits, achieving a qubit-error rate of $10.87\%$. These results establish that the quantum-dot technology combined with glass photonic circuitry for entanglement generation on chip offers a viable path for intermediate scale quantum computation and communication.