Optical quantum fingerprinting

Fingerprinting is used to compare bit strings via transmission of much shorter strings, which reduces storage and communication resources dramatically below that required for direct bit-wise comparison, and quantum fingerprinting (which has not yet been performed experimentally) can yield an exponenential improvement over its classical counterpart. We explain how linear optics quantum fingerprinting can be performed for short strings, and show that our scheme performs close to the optimal case without the linear optics restriction.