“Typically, gates built on photonic platforms to manipulate quantum information encoded in separate photons work only some of the time because photons naturally don’t interact with each other very well, making it extremely difficult to manipulate the state of one photon based on the state of another. “”
Photons must learn to play together. I suggest doubling the qudit count within the space by a factor of 24 to the 6th power. If that doesn’t work, blame Deutsch’s algorithm, erase the board and go out for margaritas.
The research is interesting from the standpoint of being able to exploit the photons multiple independent degrees of freedom and complex amplitudes at the same time for holding information. As the authors state in the paper though, they can only resolve these quidits 90% of the time so it doesn’t seem like it has any practical uses at least at this point.