Entanglement is the key resource for measurement-based quantum computing. It is stored in quantum states known as cluster states, which are prepared offline and enable quantum computing by means of purely local measurements. Universal quantum computing requires cluster states that are both large and possess (at least) a two-dimensional topology. Continuous-variable cluster states—based on bosonic modes rather than qubits—have previously been generated on a scale exceeding one million modes, but only in one dimension. Here, we report generation of a large-scale two-dimensional continuous-variable cluster state. Its structure consists of a 5- by 1240-site square lattice that was tailored to our highly scalable time-multiplexed experimental platform. It is compatible with Bosonic error-correcting codes that, with higher squeezing, enable fault-tolerant quantum computation.

In recent quantum optical continuous-variable experiments, the number of fully inseparable light modes has drastically increased by introducing a multiplexing scheme either in the time domain or in the frequency domain. Here, modifying the time-domain multiplexing experiment reported in Nature Photonics 7, 982 (2013), we demonstrate successive generation of fully inseparable light modes for more than one million modes. The resulting multi-mode state is useful as a dual-rail CV cluster state. We circumvent the previous problem of optical phase drifts, which has limited the number of fully inseparable light modes to around ten thousands, by continuous feedback control of the optical system.

Until now, Schrödinger's cat states are generated by subtracting single photons from the whole bandwidth of squeezed vacua. However, it was pointed out recently that the achievable purities are limited in such method (J. Yoshikawa, W. Asavanant, and A. Furusawa, arXiv:1707.08146 [quant-ph] (2017)). In this paper, we used our new photon subtraction method with a narrowband filtering cavity and generated a highly pure Schrödinger's cat state with the value of −0.184 at the origin of the Wigner function. To our knowledge, this is the highest value ever reported without any loss corrections. The temporal mode also becomes exponentially rising in our method, which allows us to make a real-time quadrature measurement on Schrödinger's cat states, and we obtained the value of −0.162 at the origin of the Wigner function.

We demonstrate an optical quantum nondemolition (QND) interaction gate with a bandwidth of about 100 MHz. Employing this gate, we are able to perform QND measurements in real time on randomly fluctuating signals. Our QND gate relies upon linear optics and offline-prepared squeezed states. In contrast to previous demonstrations on narrow sideband modes, our gate is compatible with non-Gaussian quantum states temporally localized in a wave-packet mode, and thus opens the way for universal gate operations and realization of quantum error correction.

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