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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)

BosonSampling with realistic single-photon sources

Matthew A. Broome, Alessandro Fedrizzi, Saleh Rahimi-Keshari, Agata M. Brańczyk, Justin Dove, Scott Aaronson, Timothy C. Ralph, Andrew G. White

Published May 1, 2013• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The extended Church-Turing thesis posits that any computable function can be calculated efficiently by a probabilistic Turing machine. If this thesis held true, the global effort to build quantum computers might ultimately be unnecessary. The thesis would however be strongly contradicted by a physical device that efficiently performs a task believed to be intractable for classical computers. BosonSampling — the sampling from a distribution of n photons undergoing some linear-optical process — is a recently developed, experimentally accessible example of such a task [1].

DOI
10.1109/cleoe-iqec.2013.6801699

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The extended Church-Turing thesis posits that any computable function can be calculated efficiently by a probabilistic Turing machine. If this thesis held true, the global effort to build quantum computers might ultimately be unnecessary. The thesis would however be strongly contradicted by a physical device that efficiently performs a task believed to be intractable for classical computers. BosonSampling — the sampling from a distribution of n photons undergoing some linear-optical process — is a recently developed, experimentally accessible example of such a task [1].
The extended Church-Turing thesis posits that any computable function can be calculated efficiently by a probabilistic Turing machine. If this thesis held true, the global effort to build quantum computers might ultimately be unnecessary. The thesis would however be strongly contradicted by a physical device that efficiently performs a task believed to be intractable for classical computers. BOSONSAMPLING—the sampling from a distribution of n photons undergoing some linear-optical process—is a recently developed, and experimentally accessible example of such a task [1].
The extended Church-Turing thesis posits that any computable function can be calculated efficiently by a probabilistic Turing machine. If this thesis held true, the global effort to build quantum computers might ultimately be unnecessary. The thesis would however be strongly contradicted by a physical device that efficiently performs a task believed to be intractable for classical computers. BosonSampling—the sampling from a distribution of n photons undergoing some linear-optical process—is a recently developed, and experimentally accessible example of such a task [1].
The extended Church-Turing theeie posits that any computable function can be oalculated efficitntly by a probabilistic Turing machine. If this thesis held true, thee global effort; to build quantum computers might ultimhiely be unnecessary. The thesis would however be strongly contradicted by a physical device that efficiently performs a task believed to be intractable for classical computers. BOSONSAMPLING—the sampling from a distribution of n photons undergoing some linear-optical process—is a recently developed, and experimentally accessible example of such a task [1].
Boson-sampling is a highly simplified, but non-universal, approach to implementing optical quantum computation. It was shown by Aaronson and Arkhipov that this protocol cannot be efficiently classically simulated unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses, which would be a shocking result in computational complexity theory. Based on this, numerous authors have made the claim that experimental boson-sampling would provide evidence against, or disprove, the Extended Church-Turing thesis -- that any physically realisable system can be efficiently simulated on a Turing machine. We argue against this claim on the basis that, under a general, physically realistic independent error model, boson-sampling does not implement a provably hard computational problem in the asymptotic limit of large systems.
The boson sampler proposed by Aaronson and Arkhipov is a nonuniversal quantum computer, which can serve as evidence against the extended Church-Turing thesis. It samples the probability distribution at the output of a linear unitary optical network with indistinguishable single photons at the input. Four experimental groups have already tested their small-scale prototypes with up to four photons. A boson sampler with a few dozens of single photons is believed to be hard to simulate on a classical computer. For scalability of a realistic boson sampler with current technology it is necessary to know the effect of the photon mode mismatch on its operation. Here a nondeterministic model of the boson sampler is analyzed, which employs partially indistinguishable single photons emitted by identical sources. A sufficient condition on the average mutual fidelity $\ensuremath{\langle}\mathcal{F}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ of the single photons is found, which guarantees that the realistic boson sampler outperforms the classical computer. Moreover, the boson-sampler computer with partially indistinguishable single photons is scalable and has more power than classical computers when the single-photon mode mismatch $1\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\langle}\mathcal{F}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ scales as $O({N}^{\ensuremath{-}3/2})$ with the total number of photons NNN.
Boson sampling is considered as a strong candidate to demonstrate the quantum computational supremacy over classical computers. However, previous proof-of-principle experiments suffered from small photon number and low sampling rates owing to the inefficiencies of the single-photon sources and multi-port optical interferometers. Here, we develop two central components for high-performance boson sampling: robust multi-photon interferometers with 0.99 transmission rate, and actively demultiplexed single-photon sources from a quantum-dot-micropillar with simultaneously high efficiency, purity and indistinguishability. We implement and validate 3-, 4-, and 5-photon boson sampling, and achieve sampling rates of 4.96 kHz, 151 Hz, and 4 Hz, respectively, which are over 24,000 times faster than the previous experiments, and over 220 times faster than obtaining one sample through calculating the matrices permanent using the first electronic computer (ENIAC) and transistorized computer (TRADIC) in the human history. Our architecture is feasible to be scaled up to larger number of photons and with higher rate to race against classical computers, and might provide experimental evidence against the Extended Church-Turing Thesis.