Physicists develop new protocol for building photonic graph states

Physicists have long recognized the value of photonic graph states in quantum information processing. However, the difficulty of making these graph states has left this value largely untapped. In a step forward for the field, researchers from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have proposed a new scheme they term "emit-then-add" for producing highly entangled states of many photons that can work with current hardware. Published in npj Quantum Information, their strategy lays the groundwork for a wide range of quantum enhanced operations including measurement-based quantum computing.