Constructing Four-Photon States for Quantum Communication and Information Processing

We provide a method for constructing a set of four-photon states suitable for quantum communication applications. Among these states is a set of concatenated quantum code states that span a decoherence-free subspace that is robust under collective-local as well as global dephasing noise. This method requires only the use of spontaneous parametric down-conversion, quantum state post-selection, and linear optics. In particular, we show how this method can be used to produce all sixteen elements of the second-order Bell gem G16, which includes these codes states and is an orthonormal basis for the Hilbert space of four qubits composed entirely of states that are fully entangled under the four-tangle measure.