Optical Implementation of Grover’s Algorithm: It’s all Done with Mirrors

Abstract

The essential operations of a quantum computer can all be accomplished using only standard linear optical elements (e.g., beamsplitters, waveplates, polarizers, etc.), with the individual bits represented by different spatial orpolarization degrees of freedom. The difference from a genuine quantum computer with distinct entangleable registers is that the optical implementation requires a number of elements which grows exponentially with the number of bits. However, by “compiling” the code, and making multiple use of redundant components, the required number of elements can be substantially reduced, allowing the realization of quantum algorithms involving several bits. Here we present a simple optical implementation of Grover’s algorithm for efficiently searching a database. In our example a database of four elements is searched with a single query, in contrast to the classical expected value of 2.25 queries. It is seen that the “quantum” computer in this case is no more than an interferometer, albeit a complicated one.