A programmable topological photonic chip.

Controlling topological phases of light allows the observation of abundant topological phenomena and the development of robust photonic devices. The prospect of more sophisticated control with topological photonic devices for practical implementations requires high-level programmability. Here we demonstrate a fully programmable topological photonic chip with large-scale integration of silicon photonic nanocircuits and microresonators. Photonic artificial atoms and their interactions in our compound system can be individually addressed and controlled, allowing the arbitrary adjustment of structural parameters and geometrical configurations for the observation of dynamic topological phase transitions and diverse photonic topological insulators. Individual programming of artificial atoms on the generic chip enables the comprehensive statistical characterization of topological robustness against relatively weak disorders, and counterintuitive topological Anderson phase transitions induced by strong disorders. This generic topological photonic chip can be rapidly reprogrammed to implement multifunctionalities, providing a flexible and versatile platform for applications across fundamental science and topological technologies.

Demonstration of hypergraph-state quantum information processing.

Complex entangled states are the key resources for measurement-based quantum computations, which is realised by performing a sequence of measurements on initially entangled qubits. Executable quantum algorithms in the graph-state quantum computing model are determined by the entanglement structure and the connectivity of entangled qubits. By generalisation from graph-type entanglement in which only the nearest qubits interact to a new type of hypergraph entanglement in which any subset of qubits can be arbitrarily entangled via hyperedges, hypergraph states represent more general resource states that allow arbitrary quantum computation with Pauli universality. Here we report experimental preparation, certification and processing of complete categories of four-qubit hypergraph states under the principle of local unitary equivalence, on a fully reprogrammable silicon-photonic quantum chip. Genuine multipartite entanglement for hypergraph states is certificated by the characterisation of entanglement witness, and the observation of violations of Mermin inequalities without any closure of distance or detection loopholes. A basic measurement-based protocol and an efficient resource state verification by color-encoding stabilizers are implemented with local Pauli measurement to benchmark the building blocks for hypergraph-state quantum computation. Our work prototypes hypergraph entanglement as a general resource for quantum information processing.