Realizing a deterministic source of multipartite-entangled photonic qubits

Sources of entangled electromagnetic radiation are a cornerstone in quantum information processing and offer unique opportunities for the study of quantum many-body physics in a controlled experimental setting. Generation of multi-mode entangled states of radiation with a large entanglement length, that is neither probabilistic nor restricted to generate specific types of states, remains challenging. Here, we demonstrate the fully deterministic generation of purely photonic entangled states such as the cluster, GHZ, and W state by sequentially emitting microwave photons from a controlled auxiliary system into a waveguide. We tomographically reconstruct the entire quantum many-body state for up to N = 4 photonic modes and infer the quantum state for even larger N from process tomography. We estimate that localizable entanglement persists over a distance of approximately ten photonic qubits. Deterministic generation of photonic multi-partite entangled states has previously been achieved for specific states using ad-hoc devices. Here, the authors present a single superconducting circuit device to deterministically generate a variety of states, namely W, GHZ, and cluster states.