Universal multiport interferometers, which can be programmed to implement any linear transformation between multiple channels, are emerging as a powerful tool for both classical and quantum photonics. These interferometers are typically composed of a regular mesh of beam splitters and phase shifters, allowing for straightforward fabrication using integrated photonic architectures and ready scalability. The current, standard design for universal multiport interferometers is based on work by Reck et al (Phys. Rev. Lett. 73, 58, 1994). We demonstrate a new design for universal multiport interferometers based on an alternative arrangement of beam splitters and phase shifters, which outperforms that by Reck et al. Our design occupies half the physical footprint of the Reck design and is significantly more robust to optical losses.

Although universal quantum computers ideally solve problems such as factoring integers exponentially more efficiently than classical machines, the formidable challenges in building such devices motivate the demonstration of simpler, problem-specific algorithms that still promise a quantum speedup. We constructed a quantum boson-sampling machine (QBSM) to sample the output distribution resulting from the nonclassical interference of photons in an integrated photonic circuit, a problem thought to be exponentially hard to solve classically. Unlike universal quantum computation, boson sampling merely requires indistinguishable photons, linear state evolution, and detectors. We benchmarked our QBSM with three and four photons and analyzed sources of sampling inaccuracy. Scaling up to larger devices could offer the first definitive quantum-enhanced computation.

The effect of second-generation pneumococcal conjugate vaccines on invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) strain distributions have not yet been well described. We analysed IPD isolates recovered from children aged <5 years through Active Bacterial Core surveillance before (2008–2009; n = 828) and after (2011–2013; n = 600) 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV13) implementation. We employed conventional testing, PCR/electrospray ionization mass spectrometry and whole genome sequence (WGS) analysis to identify serotypes, resistance features, genotypes, and pilus types. PCV13, licensed in February 2010, effectively targeted all major 19A and 7F genotypes, and decreased antimicrobial resistance, primarily owing to removal of the 19A/ST320 complex. The strain complex contributing most to the remaining β-lactam resistance during 2011–2013 was 35B/ST558. Significant emergence of non-vaccine clonal complexes was not evident. Because of the removal of vaccine serotype strains, positivity for one or both pilus types (PI-1 and PI-2) decreased in the post-PCV13 years 2011–2013 relative to 2008–2009 (decreases of 32–55% for PI-1, and >95% for PI-2 and combined PI-1 + PI-2). β-Lactam susceptibility phenotypes correlated consistently with transpeptidase region sequence combinations of the three major penicillin-binding proteins (PBPs) determined through WGS analysis. Other major resistance features were predictable by DNA signatures from WGS analysis. Multilocus sequence data combined with PBP combinations identified progeny, serotype donors and recipient strains in serotype switch events. PCV13 decreased the frequency of all PCV13 serotype clones and concurrently decreased the frequency of strain subsets with resistance and/or adherence features conducive to successful carriage. Our results serve as a reference describing key features of current paediatric IPD strains in the USA after PCV13 implementation.

Quantum interference of two independent particles in pure quantum states is fully described by the particles' distinguishability: the closer the particles are to being identical, the higher the degree of quantum interference. When more than two particles are involved, the situation becomes more complex and interference capability extends beyond pairwise distinguishability, taking on a surprisingly rich character. Here, we study many-particle interference using three photons. We show that the distinguishability between pairs of photons is not sufficient to fully describe the photons' behavior in a scattering process, but that a collective phase, the triad phase, plays a role. We are able to explore the full parameter space of threephoton interference by generating heralded single photons and interfering them in a fiber tritter. Using multiple degrees of freedom-temporal delays and polarization-we isolate three-photon interference from two-photon interference. Our experiment disproves the view that pairwise two-photon distinguishability uniquely determines the degree of nonclassical many-particle interference. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.153603 The famous Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) experiment in 1987 provided the first important example of nonclassical two-photon interference [1]. Two independent photons impinging on a beam splitter exhibit bunching behavior at the output ports that cannot be explained by a classical field model. The degree of bunching depends on how similar the two photons are in all degrees of freedom, for example, time, frequency, polarization, and spatial mode. Extending the study of interference to many particles is of interest from a fundamental as well as from a technological viewpoint [2][3][4][5][6][7]. The scattering of multiple photons in linear networks is related to solving problems in quantum information processing, metrology, and quantum state engineering [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. Thus, understanding multiphoton interference is also of great relevance for practical applications.Here, we demonstrate how many-particle interference is fundamentally richer than two-particle interference [17]. Two situations with the same pairwise distinguishability can lead to a different output distribution. This is due to a phase, the triad phase, that occurs only when more than two photons interfere.We use independent photons and a tritter, a three-port symmetric beam splitter to investigate many-particle interference. We isolate the triad phase for the first time by interfering three photons in a tritter and exploiting multiple degrees of freedom, here time and polarization. We show that interfering three identical photons and varying time delays between them, as demonstrated in previous work [5,18,19], is not sufficient to study three-photon interference in full generality [20,21]. Our experiment allows us to isolate and tune the three-photon interference term as distinct from two-photon interference. In particular, manipulation of the triad phase goes beyond what is possible using temporal...

ABSTRACTβ-Lactam antibiotics are the drugs of choice to treat pneumococcal infections. The spread of β-lactam-resistant pneumococci is a major concern in choosing an effective therapy for patients. Systematically tracking β-lactam resistance could benefit disease surveillance. Here we developed a classification system in which a pneumococcal isolate is assigned to a “PBP type” based on sequence signatures in the transpeptidase domains (TPDs) of the three critical penicillin-binding proteins (PBPs), PBP1a, PBP2b, and PBP2x. We identified 307 unique PBP types from 2,528 invasive pneumococcal isolates, which had known MICs to six β-lactams based on broth microdilution. We found that increased β-lactam MICs strongly correlated with PBP types containing divergent TPD sequences. The PBP type explained 94 to 99% of variation in MICs both before and after accounting for genomic backgrounds defined by multilocus sequence typing, indicating that genomic backgrounds made little independent contribution to β-lactam MICs at the population level. We further developed and evaluated predictive models of MICs based on PBP type. Compared to microdilution MICs, MICs predicted by PBP type showed essential agreement (MICs agree within 1 dilution) of >98%, category agreement (interpretive results agree) of >94%, a major discrepancy (sensitive isolate predicted as resistant) rate of <3%, and a very major discrepancy (resistant isolate predicted as sensitive) rate of <2% for all six β-lactams. Thus, the PBP transpeptidase signatures are robust indicators of MICs to different β-lactam antibiotics in clinical pneumococcal isolates and serve as an accurate alternative to phenotypic susceptibility testing.

Quantum teleportation is a fundamental concept in quantum physics [1] which now finds important applications at the heart of quantum technology including quantum relays [2,3], quantum repeaters [4] and linear optics quantum computing (LOQC) [5,6]. Photonic implementations have largely focussed on achieving long distance teleportation due to its suitability for decoherence-free communication [7][8][9]. Teleportation also plays a vital role in the scalability of photonic quantum computing [5,6], for which large linear optical networks will likely require an integrated architecture. Here we report the first demonstration of quantum teleportation in which all key parts-entanglement preparation, Bellstate analysis and quantum state tomographyare performed on a reconfigurable integrated photonic chip. We also show that a novel elementwise characterisation method is critical to mitigate component errors, a key technique which will become increasingly important as integrated circuits reach higher complexities necessary for quantum enhanced operation.Quantum teleportation is essential to many schemes for universal fault-tolerant quantum computation, making it an important protocol for any physical implementation of a quantum information processor [10,11]. In their seminal work, Knill, Laflamme, and Milburn showed that such a quantum processor could be constructed using only linear optical elements, at the expense of rendering each quantum logic gate probabilistic [5]. Adapting the teleportation scheme of Gottesman and Chuang [6], they then showed that this protocol could be efficiently scaled to a large number of concatenated gates, motivating a renewed interest in building more complex linear optical circuits for quantum information processing [11]. Realizing such a scheme requires building large, sophisticated networks of nested optical interferometers. This motivates the use of waveguides integrated onto compact and inherently stable photonic chips, and pioneering work has shown the viability of this approach for two- [12][13][14] and three-photon interference experiments [15][16][17]. These latter works highlighted the problems caused by photon loss, low data rates, and fabrication imperfections which make the extension to even higher photon numbers far from straightforward.Whilst photonic experiments were the first to realize quantum teleportation [18,19], demonstrations of this protocol in a waveguide architecture have been limited to fiber-based experiments [9,20]. Although there has been recent progress [21], no integrated photonic experiments have yet been able to demonstrate actual teleportation, due to the difficulty in realizing three photonic qubits on a sufficiently complex circuit [15]. In particular, integrated components require careful attention to fabricated deviations from design and the effects of increased and potentially unbalanced propagation loss. Experimental verification that integrated photonic circuits continue to perform well as their complexity increases is therefore of considerable interes...

A key obstacle to the experimental realization of many photonic quantum-enhanced technologies is the lack of low-loss sources of single photons in pure quantum states. We demonstrate a promising solution: generation of heralded single photons in a silica photonic chip by spontaneous four-wave mixing. A heralding efficiency of 40%, corresponding to a preparation efficiency of 80% accounting for detector performance, is achieved due to efficient coupling of the low-loss source to optical fibers. A single photon purity of 0.86 is measured from the source number statistics without narrow spectral filtering, and confirmed by direct measurement of the joint spectral intensity. We calculate that similar high-heralded-purity output can be obtained from visible to telecom spectral regions using this approach. On-chip silica sources can have immediate application in a wide range of single-photon quantum optics applications which employ silica photonics.

Increasing the complexity of quantum photonic devices is essential for many optical information processing applications to reach a regime beyond what can be classically simulated, and integrated photonics has emerged as a leading platform for achieving this. Here we demonstrate three-photon quantum operation of an integrated device containing three coupled interferometers, eight spatial modes and many classical and nonclassical interferences. This represents a critical advance over previous complexities and the first on-chip nonclassical interference with more than two photonic inputs. We introduce a new scheme to verify quantum behaviour, using classically characterised device elements and hierarchies of photon correlation functions. We accurately predict the device's quantum behaviour and show operation inconsistent with both classical and bi-separable quantum models. Such methods for verifying multiphoton quantum behaviour are vital for achieving increased circuit complexity. Our experiment paves the way for the next generation of integrated photonic quantum simulation and computing devices.