Photonic Boson Sampling in a Tunable Circuit

By M. Broome, Alessandro Fedrizzi, S. Rahimi-Keshari, J. Dove, Scott Aaronson, Timothy C. Ralph, A. White. Science, 2012

581 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Computing Power of Quantum Mechanics There is much interest in developing quantum computers in order to perform certain tasks much faster than, or that are intractable for, a classical computer. A general quantum computer, however, requires the fabrication and operation a number of quantum logic devices (see the Perspective by Franson). Broome et al. (p. 794, published online 20 December) and Spring et al. (p. 798, published online 20 December) describe experiments in which single photons and quantum interference were used to perform a calculation (the permanent of a matrix) that is very difficult on a classical computer. Similar to random walks, quantum walks on a graph describe the movement of a walker on a set of predetermined paths; instead of flipping a coin to decide which way to go at each point, a quantum walker can take several paths at once. Childs et al. (p. 791) propose an architecture for a quantum computer, based on quantum walks of multiple interacting walkers. The system is capable of performing any quantum operation using a subset of its nodes, with the size of the subset scaling favorably with the complexity of the operation. Optical circuits are used to demonstrate a quantum-enhanced calculation. [Also see Perspective by Franson] Quantum computers are unnecessary for exponentially efficient computation or simulation if the Extended Church-Turing thesis is correct. The thesis would be strongly contradicted by physical devices that efficiently perform tasks believed to be intractable for classical computers. Such a task is boson sampling: sampling the output distributions of n bosons scattered by some passive, linear unitary process. We tested the central premise of boson sampling, experimentally verifying that three-photon scattering amplitudes are given by the permanents of submatrices generated from a unitary describing a six-mode integrated optical circuit. We find the protocol to be robust, working even with the unavoidable effects of photon loss, non-ideal sources, and imperfect detection. Scaling this to large numbers of photons should be a much simpler task than building a universal quantum computer.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1d5210bd6d5e315435eacac7811cc6f4963768ab

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum transport simulations in a programmable nanophotonic processor (2015, methodology): “To measure the PNP output mode intensities, we developed a 12-channel photodiode array PCB with approximately 40 dB of dynamic range per channel.”
On-chip detection of non-classical light by scalable integration of single-photon detectors (2014, unknown): “Waveguide-integrated SNSPDs on the same PIC enabled onchip g(2)(t) measurements of non-classical light.”
Photon temporal modes: a complete framework for quantum information science (2015, background): “[4] Matthew A Broome, Alessandro Fedrizzi, Saleh RahimiKeshari, Justin Dove, Scott Aaronson, Timothy C Ralph, and Andrew G White, “Photonic Boson Sampling in a Tunable Circuit,” Science 339, 794–798 (2013).”
Quantum Simulation (2013, background): “Several recent experiments have demonstrated boson sampling using photons (Broome et al., 2013; Crespi et al., 2013; Spring et al., 2013; Tillmann et al., 2013), and Ref.”
Integrated photonic quantum technologies (2019, background): “The first experimental demonstrations of Boson sampling were reported with n = 3 photons [91–95], mainly in integrated photonics.”
Quantum computational advantage using photons (2020, background): “Inspired by the original proposal of Aaronson and Arkhipov ( 5 ), numerous experiments have demonstrated boson sampling with continuously increasing complexity ( 20-27 ).”