Improved Heralded Schemes to Generate Entangled States From Single Photons

We present a novel semi-analytical methodology to construct optimal linear optical circuits for heralded production of 3-photon GHZ and 2-photon Bell states. We provide a detailed description and analysis of the resulting optical schemes, which deliver success probabilities of 1/54 and 2/27 for dual-rail encoded 3-GHZ and Bell states generation, respectively. Our results improve the known constructive bounds on the success probabilities for 3-GHZ states and are of particular importance for a ballistic quantum computing model, for which these states provide an essential resource.