Scaling and Networking Modular Photonic Quantum Computers

Aurora: A Modular Photonic Quantum Computer Demonstration

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OEwaves is proud to have contributed key components to Aurora, a recent photonic quantum computing architecture that combines dozens of photonic chips to show real-world progress toward scalable, fault-tolerant quantum systems.

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Aurora integrates 35 photonic chips networked over fiber optics, including squeezed-light sources, photon-number-resolving detectors, and chip-based homodyne detectors. It synthesizes cluster states spanning tens of billions of modes and performs real-time adaptive operations and decoding, all in a combined system housed in just a few server racks.

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A critical part of the system is its laser architecture. OEwaves’ narrow-linewidth lasers (OE4040-XLN) are used as pump, local oscillator, and reference beams. They enable the spectral purity, phase stability, and mode matching necessary for the squeezed states, LO locking, and the many interferometric modules.

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While the Aurora system is not yet at full fault-tolerant error thresholds (optical losses remain a challenge), this work demonstrates all of the critical functional blocks: non-Gaussian state generation, multiplexing, fiber delays, cluster state stitching, homodyne measurements, and real-time feedforward.

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This milestone shows how integrated photonic technologies, including those supplied by OEwaves, are helping unlock quantum computing architectures capable of future error correction, large-scale entanglement, and practical quantum tasks.

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Read the full article here.