A Survey on Quantum and Photonic Hardware: Principles, Implementations, and Applications

Quantum and photonic hardware have become a core driver of next-generation technologies for computing, secure communication, sensing, and machine intelligence. Photonics offers advantages including relatively low decoherence, long-distance propagation, and compatibility with integrated waveguide fabrication. Yet practical scalability faces challenges including optical loss, probabilistic nonlinear interactions, photon-generation inefficiency, and fabrication maturity. Recent advances include reconfigurable VLSI photonic processors, modular temporal-multiplexed cluster-state synthesis, hybrid SiN/InP QKD transceivers, and probabilistic photonic machine-learning accelerators. A critical analysis reveals that scalable photonic quantum systems will not emerge from a single dominant architecture, but from heterogeneous integration of complementary materials, encodings, and nonlinear light–matter interactions. This survey systematically categorizes photonic hardware platforms by scalability, nonlinearity, manufacturability, and application readiness, highlighting key trade-offs that shape near-term deployment and long-term fault-tolerant quantum computing. By structuring the field around architectural roles rather than isolated devices, this work provides a unified framework for evaluating emerging photonic quantum technologies.

کلیدواژه ها:

Quantum Photonics ، Integrated Quantum Circuits ، Bosonic Encoding ، Quantum Key Distribution ، Temporal Multiplexing ، Nonlinear Photonic Gates