Heralding Higher-Dimensional Bell and Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger states using multiport splitters

Abstract One of the most important resources for quantum optical experiments and applications are on-demand highly entangled multiphoton quantum states. A promising way of generating them is heralding entanglement generation at a high rate from letting independent photons interfere. However, such schemes often work for a specific internal degree of freedom of the interfering photons only. Going to higher numbers of entangled photons, the success probabilities decrease while the number of necessary resources, e.g. auxiliary photons and optical elements, increases. To make probabilistic schemes feasible also for larger quantum states, it is therefore important to find resource-efficient generation schemes with high success probabilities. In this work, we introduce easily implementable schemes to herald qubit Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) states, higher-dimensional Bell states and higher-dimensional three-party GHZ states. Our schemes solely rely on multiphoton interference, i.e. they can be adjusted to work for arbitrary degrees of freedom. Furthermore, they demonstrate high success probabilities and need comparably few auxiliary photons.