光子系统在量子信息处理和传输过程中有非常重要的应用.譬如,利用光子与原子(或人工原子)之间的相互作用,可以完成信息的安全传输、存储和快速的并行计算处理等任务.光子系统具有多个自由度,如极化、空间模式、轨道角动量、时间一能量、频率等自由度.光子系统的多个自由度可以同时应用于量子信息处理过程.超并行量子计算利用光子系统多个自由度的光量子态同时进行量子并行计算,使量子计算具有更强的并行性,且需要的量子资源少,更能抵抗光子数损耗等噪声的影响.多个自由度同时存在纠缠的光子系统量子态称为超纠缠态,它能够提高量子通信的容量与安全性,辅助完成一些重要的量子通信任务.在本综述中,我们简要介绍了光子系统两自由度量子态在量子信息中的一些新应用,包括超并行量子计算、超纠缠态分析、超纠缠浓缩和纯化三个部分.
Photon system is a promising candidate for quantum information processing, and it can be used to achieve some important tasks with the interaction between a photon and an atom (or a artificial atom), such as the transmission of secret information, the storage of quantum states, and parallel quantum computing. Several degrees of freedom (DOFs) of a photon system can be used to carry information in the realization of quantum information processing, such as the polarization, spatial-mode, orbit-angular-momentum, time-bin, and frequency DOFs. A hyperparallel quantum com- puter can implement the quantum operations on several DOFs of a quantum system simultaneously, which reduces the operation time and the resources consumed in quantum information processing. The hyperparallel quantum operations are more robust against the photonic dissipation noise than the quantum computing in one DOF of a photon system. Hyperentanglement, defined as the entanglement in several DOFs of a quantum system, can improve the channel capacity and the security of long-distance quantum communication, and it can also be conductive to completing some important tasks in quantum communication. Hyperentangled Bell~state analysis is used to completely distinguish the 16 hyper- entangled Bell states, which is very useful in high-capacity quantum communication protocols and quantum repeaters. In order to depress the effect of noises in quantum channel, hyperentanglement concentration and hyperentanglement purification are required to improve the entanglement of the quantum systems in long-distance quantum communication, which is also very useful in high-capacity quantum repeaters. Hyperentanglement concentration is used to distill several nonlocal photon systems in a maximally hyperentangled state from those in a partially hyperentangled pure state, and hyperentanglement purification is used to distill several nonlocal photon systems in a high-fidelity hyperentangled state from those in a mixed hyperentangled state with less entanglement. In