Quantum circuits with many photons on a programmable nanophotonic chip

By Juan Miguel Arrazola, Ville Bergholm, K. Br'adler, Thomas R. Bromley, M. Collins, Ish Dhand, A. Fumagalli, T. Gerrits, A. Goussev, L. Helt and 29 more. Nature, 2021

562 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Growing interest in quantum computing for practical applications has led to a surge in the availability of programmable machines for executing quantum algorithms1,2. Present-day photonic quantum computers3–7 have been limited either to non-deterministic operation, low photon numbers and rates, or fixed random gate sequences. Here we introduce a full-stack hardware−software system for executing many-photon quantum circuit operations using integrated nanophotonics: a programmable chip, operating at room temperature and interfaced with a fully automated control system. The system enables remote users to execute quantum algorithms that require up to eight modes of strongly squeezed vacuum initialized as two-mode squeezed states in single temporal modes, a fully general and programmable four-mode interferometer, and photon number-resolving readout on all outputs. Detection of multi-photon events with photon numbers and rates exceeding any previous programmable quantum optical demonstration is made possible by strong squeezing and high sampling rates. We verify the non-classicality of the device output, and use the platform to carry out proof-of-principle demonstrations of three quantum algorithms: Gaussian boson sampling, molecular vibronic spectra and graph similarity8. These demonstrations validate the platform as a launchpad for scaling photonic technologies for quantum information processing. A system for realizing many-photon quantum circuits is presented, comprising a programmable nanophotonic chip operating at room temperature, interfaced with a fully automated control system.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e65901d3d5fce3d60174d4f8ac3c03e7f8cf7cc7

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Citations in the corpus

Ultra-compact nonvolatile phase shifter based on electrically reprogrammable transparent phase change materials (2021, background): “The ability to actively control the phase of light is the common denominator in applications ranging from optical switching in data communications [3], beam steering, [4] spectroscopy, [5] optical neural networks, [6] as well as quantum processing and computing with photons [7].”
Quantum computational advantage with a programmable photonic processor (2022, methodology): “Spatial overlap is ensured by using single-mode fibre coupling at the entrance and exit of each loop delay, and samples are collected using an array of photon-number resolving (PNR) detectors based on superconducting transition-edge sensors (TES) with 95% detection efficiency 39,40 .”
General parameter-shift rules for quantum gradients (2021, background): “With the advent of accessible, near-term quantum hardware, the ability to rapidly test and prototype quantum algorithms has never been as approachable [1, 2, 3, 4].”