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Scientific Reports 4: Article number: 6115; published online: 19 August 2014; updated: 12 May 2017 This article was originally published under a [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0/CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] license, but has now been made available under a [CC BY 4.0] license. The PDF and HTML versions of the paper have been modified accordingly.

Photonic quantum simulators are promising candidates for providing insight into other small- to medium-sized quantum systems. Recent experiments have shown that photonic quantum systems have the advantage to exploit quantum interference for the quantum simulation of the ground state of Heisenberg spin systems. Here we experimentally characterize this quantum interference at a tuneable beam splitter and further investigate the measurement-induced interactions of a simulated four-spin system by comparing the entanglement dynamics using pairwise concurrence. We also study theoretically a four-site square lattice with next-nearest neighbor interactions and a six-site checkerboard lattice, which might be in reach of current technology.

Photonic quantum systems are among the most promising architectures for quantum computers. It is well known that for dual-rail photons effective non-linearities and near-deterministic non-trivial two-qubit gates can be achieved via the measurement process and by introducing ancillary photons. While in principle this opens a legitimate path to scalable linear optical quantum computing, the technical requirements are still very challenging and thus other optical encodings are being actively investigated. One of the alternatives is to use single-rail encoded photons, where entangled states can be deterministically generated. Here we prove that even for such systems universal optical quantum computing using only passive optical elements such as beam splitters and phase shifters is not possible. This no-go theorem proves that photon bunching cannot be passively suppressed even when extra ancilla modes and arbitrary number of photons are used. Our result provides useful guidance for the design of optical quantum computers., Comment: v3: Expanded to 7 pages and rewritten. Accepted for publication in Scientific Reports