Shortcuts to adiabatic non-Abelian braiding on silicon photonic chips

Abstract: The non-Abelian braiding describes the exchange behavior of anyons, which can be leveraged to encode 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 impeding practical applications. Here, we conceive and demonstrate a shortcut to adiabatic (STA) braiding of telecommunication light in three-dimensional silicon photonic chips. Our device comprises tri-layer silicon waveguides stacked and embedded in the SU-8 polymer, employing an STA strategy to expedite the braiding operations and give rise to 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. Remarkably, this achievement represents the most compact braiding apparatus ever reported, 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.