A fundamental and open question is whether cross-Kerr nonlinearities can be used to construct a controlled-phase (CPHASE) gate. Here we propose a gate constructed from a discrete set of atom-mediated cross-Kerr interaction sites with counter-propagating photons. We show that the average gate fidelity $F$ between a CPHASE and our proposed gate increases as the number of interaction sites increases and the spectral width of the photon decreases, e.g. with 12 sites we find $F > 99\%$.

4 pages (+ appendix), 4 figures. See companion paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.03914 . v3: Closer to published version