Reconstruction of the reduced transfer matrix for tunable linear-optical circuits

Abstract Tunable linear-optical interferometers are a key element in the implementation of both classical and quantum information technologies. At the same time, during the production process, these systems are subject to various instrumental imperfections and it is necessary to be able to determine with what accuracy and what transformations the manufactured device is capable to reproduce. For integrated devices, such tasks are difficult to perform due to the difficulties in obtaining direct access to individual optical elements of the circuit. Existing methods for reconstructing the transfer matrix of tunable linear-optical interferometers require measuring the phases of its matrix elements at different values of control signals in the circuit, which is also an experimentally time-consuming task. However, in some cases, it is possible to construct a mathematical model of the circuit that works for any values of its control signals, measuring only partial amplitude transmission coefficients at the outputs of the circuit, which significantly simplifies reconstruction and is relevant in a number of applications. In this paper, we performed numerical and experimental approbation of the method on the example of a linear-optical interferometer with four inputs and four outputs with a universal architecture based on mixing layers. The average fidelity value of the reconstruction of the reduced transfer matrix of the optical interferometer, taking into account realistic noise in the experiment, was 99.9% and can be improved due to the proven stability of the model to them.