Boson Sampling on a Photonic Chip

By J. Spring, B. Metcalf, Peter Conway Humphreys, W. Kolthammer, Xian-Min Jin, M. Barbieri, A. Datta, N. Thomas-Peter, N. K. Langford, D. Kundys and 4 more. Science, 2012

760 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] Although universal quantum computers ideally solve problems such as factoring integers exponentially more efficiently than classical machines, the formidable challenges in building such devices motivate the demonstration of simpler, problem-specific algorithms that still promise a quantum speedup. We constructed a quantum boson-sampling machine (QBSM) to sample the output distribution resulting from the nonclassical interference of photons in an integrated photonic circuit, a problem thought to be exponentially hard to solve classically. Unlike universal quantum computation, boson sampling merely requires indistinguishable photons, linear state evolution, and detectors. We benchmarked our QBSM with three and four photons and analyzed sources of sampling inaccuracy. Scaling up to larger devices could offer the first definitive quantum-enhanced computation.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/76bb02c02fe675eec983cc5976302578fbe6354c

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Citations in the corpus

Silicon Quantum Photonics (2015, background): “Early demonstrations used glass-based waveguides to achieve high-fidelity on-chip quantum interference and quantum logic operations [7], multiparticle quantum walks [8], the reconfigurable generation and manipulation of entanglement [9], and bosonic sampling [10]– [12].”
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 teleportation on a photonic chip (2014, background): “Finally, scattering losses not only reduce data rates but exacerbate the issues identified above, already creating challenges in small-scale experiments [16].”
Experimental validation of photonic boson sampling (2013, methodology): “Input modes: (3,4,5) 9-mode interferometer Input modes: (4,5,6) b”
Quantum computational supremacy (2017, background): “several experimental groups quickly demonstrated small-scale examples of boson sampling experiments, with up to 4 coincident photons in up to 6 modes.(15,21,53,56) Subsequent work has experimentally validated boson sampling, in the sense of implementing statistical tests that distinguish the boson s”
Quantum computational advantage using photons (2020, background): “The early proof-of-principle demonstrations of boson sampling (20-23) used probabilistic, post-selected pseudo-single photons from parametric down-conversion (PDC) (28).”