Abstract
Any quantum state of the radiation field, sliced in small non-overlapping space-time bins is a collection of single-rail qubits, each spanning the vacuum and single-photon Fock state of a mode. Quantum logic on these qubits would enable arbitrary measurements on information-bearing light, but is hard due to the lack of strong nonlinearities. With unentangled ancilla single-rail qubits, an 8-port interferometer and photon detection, we show any single-rail qubit measurement in the XY Bloch plane is realizable with success probability 147/256, which beats the prior-known 1/2 limit.