Researchers Entangle 13 Photons to Build Larger Quantum Graphs

Measurement-based quantum computing and memory-less quantum repeaters are key areas of research. Although some initial examples have been successfully prepared, creating large-scale graph states with programmable connections at scale remains an outstanding challenge. Fusion offers a promising “divide-and-conquer” approach by linking smaller resource states into larger, more complex graphs. However, its practical scalability has been limited by the probabilistic nature of conventional fusion protocols, requiring extensive hardware overhead and feed-forward resources to achieve deterministic outcomes. A deterministic fusion operation with built-in error correction is introduced and experimentally demonstrated. Entanglement now extends to 13 qubits, surpassing prior demonstrations limited to 12, and opens possibilities for more complex quantum calculations; earlier methods struggled with topological complexity as entanglement scaled…