Entanglement-preserving photonic switching: Full cross-bar operation with quantum data streams

As the field of quantum communications matures and adopts larger network topologies, it will require switches capable of multiplexing and demultiplexing entangled photons between network nodes. Such switches will need to operate at high speeds, with low loss, and minimal signal-band noise, while also retaining the quantum state of the routed photons. We present an all-optical, fiber-based, dual-in, dual-out switch that has a switching window of 45 ps and an insertion loss of <3.0 dB. In addition, the switch introduces minimal degradation (<1.5) to the quantum state of the routed entangled photons. As a test of the switch's utility, we demultiplex a single quantum channel from a 6.5-GHz dual-channel quantum data stream. The recovered quantum state exhibits a fidelity of 96.2± 1.2 with the prepared state.