Bidirectional Mapping between a Biphoton Polarization State and a Single-Photon Two-Qubit State

How to manipulate (operate or measure) single photons efficiently and simply is the basic problem in optical quantum information processing. We first present an efficient scheme to transform a biphoton polarization state to a corresponding single-photon state encoded by its polarization and spatial modes. This single-photon state carries both the information of the controlled and target photons. It will make the realization of bipartite positive-operator-valued measurements efficiently and simply. Moreover, the inverse transformation from the single-photon state back to the corresponding biphoton polarization state is also proposed. Using both the transformations, the realization of the arbitrary two-qubit unitary operation is simple with an M-Z interferometer. All the schemes are feasible with the current experimental technology.