Topological protection of photonic path entanglement

The recent advent of photonic topological insulators has opened the door to using the robustness of topologically protected transport-originated in the domain of condensed matter physics-in optical devices and in quantum simulation. Concurrently, quantum walks in photonic networks have been shown to yield exponential speedup for certain algorithms, such as Boson sampling. Here we theoretically demonstrate that photonic topological insulators can robustly protect the transport of quantum information through photonic networks, despite the presence of disorder. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America