Experimental creation of superposition of unknown photonic quantum states

As one of the most intriguing intrinsic properties of the quantum world, quantum superposition provokes great interest in its own generation. Though a universal quantum machine that creates superposition of two arbitrary unknown states has been shown to be physically impossible, a probabilistic protocol exists given that two input states have nonzero overlaps with the referential state. Here we report a probabilistic quantum machine realizing superposition of two arbitrary unknown photonic qubits as long as they have nonzero overlaps with the horizontal polarization state vertical bar H >. A total of 11 different qubit pairs are chosen to test this protocol and we obtain the average fidelity as high as 0.99, which shows the excellent reliability of our realization. This realization may have significant applications in quantum information and quantum computation, e.g., generating nonclassical states and realizing information compression in a quantum computation.