Linear optical protocol for preparation of N-photon Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state with conventional photon detectors

We propose a linear optical protocol to generate Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state of N distant photons with the certain success probability. The proposed setup involves simple linear optical elements, N pairs of the two-photon polarization entangled states, and the conventional photon detectors that only distinguish the vacuum and nonvacuum Fock number states. This makes the protocol more realizable in experiments. (c) 2008 American Institute of Physics.