Errors in heralded circuits for linear optical entanglement generation

The heralded generation of entangled states underpins many photonic quantum technologies. As quantum error correction thresholds are determined by underlying physical noise mechanisms, a detailed and faithful characterization of resource states is required. Non-computational leakage, e.g. more than one photon occupying a dual-rail encoded qubit, is an error not captured by standard forms of state tomography, which postselect on photons remaining in the computational subspace. Here we use the continuous-variable (CV) formalism and first quantized state representation to develop a simulation framework that reconstructs photonic quantum states in the presence of partial distinguishability and resulting non-computational leakage errors. Using these tools, we analyze a variety of Bell state generation circuits and find that the five photon discrete Fourier transform (DFT) Bell state generation scheme [Phys Rev. Lett. 126 23054 (2021)] is most robust to such errors for near-ideal photons. Through characterization of a photonic entangling gate, we demonstrate how leakage errors prevent a modular characterization of concatenated gates using current tomographical procedures. Our work is a necessary step in revealing the true noise models that must be addressed in fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing architectures.