Improved heralded schemes to generate entangled states from single photons

We present a semianalytical methodology to construct optimal linear-optical circuits for the heralded production of three-photon Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (3-GHZ) and two-photon Bell states. We provide a detailed description and analysis of the resulting optical schemes, which deliver success probabilities of 1/54 and 2/27 for dual-rail encoded 3-GHZ and Bell-state generation, respectively. Our results improve the known constructive bounds on the success probabilities for 3-GHZ states and are of particular importance for a ballistic quantum computing model [M. Gimeno-Segovia et al., Phys. Rev. Lett, 115, 020502 (2015)], for which these states provide an essential resource.