Generation of multi-photon entangled states based on weak measurement and linear optical elements

This paper presents a scheme which generates multi-photon entangled states based on Mach–Zehnder interferometer and is mainly composed of a photon source with weak measurement, two beam splitters and two orthogonal polarizers. This method can obtain higher efficiency and flexibility compared to previously proposed methods. Furthermore, a practical protocol of the fiber-based setup is proposed. It consists of the photons generation and the entangled states production. Moreover, the mitigation of the decoherence existing in the quantum channels between the proposed entanglement source and its users is provided. The proposed protocol can be exploited in experiments in quantum cryptography and quantum computing.