Two qubit gates for photons are generally thought to require exotic materials with huge optical nonlinearities. We show here that, if we accept two qubit gates that only work conditionally, single photon sources, passive linear optics and particle detectors are sufficient for implementing reliable quantum algorithms. The conditional nature of the gates requires feed-forward from the detectors to the optical elements. Without feed forward, non-deterministic quantum computation is possible. We discuss one proposed single photon source based on the surface acoustic wave guiding of single electrons.
Quantum-dot single-photon sources: Prospects for applications in linear optics quantum-information processing