Optical Quantum Computing
Abstract
Under the label of optical quantum computing, there are a variety of protocols and experiments that use the quantum properties of light to achieve a computational advantage over classical computing machines. In this review, we describe some of the main implementations, which differ in the type of encoding and in how the computation is performed, whether using gates or cluster states. For each protocol, we describe advantages and challenges with an overview of the experimental results obtained, summarized in tables. Because of the great relevance achieved in this field, there is a section dedicated to non-universal quantum computation with photons, where boson sampling, variational quantum eigensolvers, and quantum machine learning applications are described. The aim is to give the reader the broadest overview of the applications where photons and their quantum properties play a key role in computation.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{hasnaoui2026optical,
title = {{Optical Quantum Computing}},
author = {Hamza Hasnaoui and Leonardo Limongi and Taira Giordani and Beatrice Polacchi and Alberto Quaranta and Martino Bernard and Fabio Sciarrino and Mirko Lobino},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.18347},
eprint = {2609.18347},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18347},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Optical Quantum Computing
AU - Hamza Hasnaoui
AU - Leonardo Limongi
AU - Taira Giordani
AU - Beatrice Polacchi
AU - Alberto Quaranta
AU - Martino Bernard
AU - Fabio Sciarrino
AU - Mirko Lobino
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/16
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.18347
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18347
AB - Under the label of optical quantum computing, there are a variety of protocols and experiments that use the quantum properties of light to achieve a computational advantage over classical computing machines. In this review, we describe some of the main implementations, which differ in the type of encoding and in how the computation is performed, whether using gates or cluster states. For each protocol, we describe advantages and challenges with an overview of the experimental results obtained, summarized in tables. Because of the great relevance achieved in this field, there is a section dedicated to non-universal quantum computation with photons, where boson sampling, variational quantum eigensolvers, and quantum machine learning applications are described. The aim is to give the reader the broadest overview of the applications where photons and their quantum properties play a key role in computation.
ER -