Experimental realization of linear-optical partial SWAP gates

We present a linear-optical implementation of a class of two-qubit partial SWAP gates for polarization states of photons. Different gate operations, including the SWAP and entangling square root of SWAP, can be obtained by changing a classical control parameter – namely the path difference in the interferometer. Reconstruction of output states, full process tomography and evaluation of entanglement of formation prove very good performance of the gates.