Shortcuts to adiabatic non-Abelian braiding on silicon photonic chips

Abstract

Non-Abelian braiding describes the exchange behavior of anyons, useful for encoding qubits for quantum computing. Recently, this concept has been realized in classical photonic and acoustic systems. However, these implementations are constrained by adiabatic conditions, necessitating long operation distances and hindering practical applications. Here, we conceive and demonstrate shortcut to adiabatic (STA) braiding of light in three-dimensional silicon photonic chips. Our device comprises trilayer silicon waveguides embedded in the SU-8 polymer, using an STA strategy to expedite the braiding operations, resulting in compact devices that function as photonic quantum X, Y, and Z gates. We further experimentally observed non-Abelian braiding behaviors based on this STA-braiding scheme. Our work represents a compact braiding apparatus with a size reduction of nearly three orders of magnitude compared to previous works. This work presents a feasible approach to accelerating adiabatic braiding evolutions, paving the way for compact, CMOS-compatible non-Abelian photonic devices.