Photonic Boson Sampling in a Tunable Circuit
Abstract
Quantum computers are unnecessary for exponentially-efficient computation or simulation if the Extended Church-Turing thesis---a foundational tenet of computer science---is correct. The thesis would be directly contradicted by a physical device that efficiently performs a task believed to be intractable for classical computers. Such a task is BosonSampling: obtaining a distribution of n bosons scattered by some linear-optical unitary process. Here we test the central premise of BosonSampling, experimentally verifying that the amplitudes of 3-photon scattering processes are given by the permanents of submatrices generated from a unitary describing a 6-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. Strong evidence against the Extended Church-Turing thesis will come from scaling to large numbers of photons, which is a much simpler task than building a universal quantum computer.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1212.2234,
title = {Photonic Boson Sampling in a Tunable Circuit},
author = {Matthew A. Broome and Alessandro Fedrizzi and Saleh Rahimi-Keshari and Justin Dove and Scott Aaronson and Timothy Ralph and Andrew G. White},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1212.2234},
year = {2013}
}
Comments
See also Crespi et al., arXiv:1212.2783; Spring et al., arXiv:1212.2622; and Tillmann et al., arXiv:1212.2240