Soliton-Guided Quantum Information Processing

We describe applications of solitons and soliton collisions to the transport, transfer, and beam-splitting of qubits carried by optical photons. The transport and transfer realize the “flying qubits” necessary for quantum information processing, and the beam-splitting leads, in theory, to an implementation of quantum computing using linear optics. These proposed applications are embedded in a uniform optical fiber and require no special device fabrication, no cooling, and no vacuum. The pioneering papers of Feynman [1] and Deutsch [2] in the 1980s sparked the rapid development of the field of quantum information processing. The theoretical and experimental progress has been remarkable, with the development, for example, of quantum error correction and a fast algorithm for factoring, and the exploration of a wide variety of physical implementations. In the latter category, the optical photon as the carrier of a qubit has played an important role in the experimental demonstration of quantum cryptography and other important applications to communications and information processing. At the same time there has been tremendous progress in our understanding of classical nonlinear waves, and, in particular, solitons in optical fibers. In this chapter we will explore what role solitons and soliton collisions might play in the development of quantum information processing with optical photons. For a more detailed account, the reader is referred to [3, 4, 5], from which the material in this chapter was drawn.