Storing Small Photonic Cluster States in a Dephasing Environment

We consider the effects of decoherence on the entanglement of photonic cluster states. Large photonic cluster states can be built by fusing together smaller photonic cluster states via probabilistic fusion operations. For this construction process it is necessary to store these smaller cluster states in some way so as to have them available for attempted fusion operations. While in storage the photonic cluster states may undergo dephasing. The effects of dephasing on small, primitive cluster states is explored here with the aim of determining how to locally rotate the qubits of the cluster state so as to lose the least amount of entanglement due to the dephasing process.