Boson Sampling on a Photonic Chip
Abstract
While 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 construct 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 benchmark our QBSM with three and four photons and analyze sources of sampling inaccuracy. Our studies pave the way to larger devices that could offer the first definitive quantum-enhanced computation.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1212.2622,
title = {Boson Sampling on a Photonic Chip},
author = {Justin B. Spring and Benjamin J. Metcalf and Peter C. Humphreys and W. Steven Kolthammer and Xian-Min Jin and Marco Barbieri and Animesh Datta and Nicholas Thomas-Peter and Nathan K. Langford and Dmytro Kundys and James C. Gates and Brian J. Smith and Peter G. R. Smith and Ian A. Walmsley},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1212.2622},
year = {2013}
}
Comments
Main text: 5 pages, 4 figures. Supp Info: 6 pages