We report on a detailed characterization of a three-qubit linear optical quantum Toffoli gate. Our experiment utilizes correlated photon pairs generated in the process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion. Two qubits are encoded into polarization and spatial degrees of freedom of a signal photon, and the third qubit is represented by polarization of an idler photon. The linear optical Toffoli gate is implemented by interference of photons on a partially polarizing beam splitter inserted inside a Mach Zehnder interferometer formed by two calcite beam displacers. We have measured 4032 different two-photon coincidences, which allows us to estimate the fidelity of the gate to be 90%. Although these data are not tomographically complete, we show that they are sufficient for a reliable reconstruction of the quantum process matrix of the gate via the recently proposed maximum likelihood–maximum entropy estimation procedure. To probe the entangling capability of the gate, we have investigated generation of three-qubit GHZ states from fully and partially separable input states and we have performed a full tomography of the output states. We compare the reconstructed states with theoretical predictions obtained with the use of the estimated quantum process matrix and obtain a very good agreement.

• Received 8 July 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.92.032312