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Physics

Lost Photons Won’t Derail Quantum Sampling

Austin P. Lund

Published Jun 6, 2018• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Boson sampling is a well-defined task that is strongly believed to be intractable for classical computers, but can be efficiently solved by a specific quantum simulator.However, an outstanding problem for largescale experimental boson sampling is the scalability.Here we report an experiment on boson sampling with photon loss, and demonstrate that boson sampling with a few photons lost can increase the sampling rate.Our experiment uses a quantum-dot-micropillar single-photon source demultiplexed into up to seven input ports of a 16 × 16 mode ultralow-loss photonic circuit, and we detect three-, four-and fivefold coincidence counts.We implement and validate lossy boson sampling with one and two photons lost, and obtain sampling rates of 187, 13.6, and 0.78 kHz for five-, six-, and seven-photon boson sampling with two photons lost, which is 9.4, 13.9, and 18.0 times faster than the standard boson sampling, respectively.Our experiment shows an approach to significantly enhance the sampling rate of multiphoton boson sampling.

DOI
10.1103/physics.11.57

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Boson sampling is a well-defined task that is strongly believed to be intractable for classical computers, but can be efficiently solved by a specific quantum simulator.However, an outstanding problem for largescale experimental boson sampling is the scalability.Here we report an experiment on boson sampling with photon loss, and demonstrate that boson sampling with a few photons lost can increase the sampling rate.Our experiment uses a quantum-dot-micropillar single-photon source demultiplexed into up to seven input ports of a 16 × 16 mode ultralow-loss photonic circuit, and we detect three-, four-and fivefold coincidence counts.We implement and validate lossy boson sampling with one and two photons lost, and obtain sampling rates of 187, 13.6, and 0.78 kHz for five-, six-, and seven-photon boson sampling with two photons lost, which is 9.4, 13.9, and 18.0 times faster than the standard boson sampling, respectively.Our experiment shows an approach to significantly enhance the sampling rate of multiphoton boson sampling.
Boson sampling is a well-defined task that is strongly believed to be intractable for classical computers, but can be efficiently solved by a specific quantum simulator. However, an outstanding problem for large-scale experimental boson sampling is the scalability. Here we report an experiment on boson sampling with photon loss, and demonstrate that boson sampling with a few photons lost can increase the sampling rate. Our experiment uses a quantum-dot-micropillar single-photon source demultiplexed into up to seven input ports of a 16×16 mode ultralow-loss photonic circuit, and we detect three-, four- and fivefold coincidence counts. We implement and validate lossy boson sampling with one and two photons lost, and obtain sampling rates of 187, 13.6, and 0.78 kHz for five-, six-, and seven-photon boson sampling with two photons lost, which is 9.4, 13.9, and 18.0 times faster than the standard boson sampling, respectively. Our experiment shows an approach to significantly enhance the sampling rate of multiphoton boson sampling.
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.
Boson sampling is a problem strongly believed to be intractable for classical computers, but can be naturally solved on a specialized photonic quantum simulator. Here, we implement the first time-bin-encoded boson sampling using a highly indistinguishable (∼94%) single-photon source based on a single quantum-dot-micropillar device. The protocol requires only one single-photon source, two detectors, and a loop-based interferometer for an arbitrary number of photons. The single-photon pulse train is time-bin encoded and deterministically injected into an electrically programmable multimode network. The observed three- and four-photon boson sampling rates are 18.8 and 0.2 Hz, respectively, which are more than 100 times faster than previous experiments based on parametric down-conversion.
A boson-sampling device is a quantum machine expected to perform tasks intractable for a classical computer, yet requiring minimal nonclassical resources as compared to full-scale quantum computers. Photonic implementations to date employed sources based on inefficient processes that only simulate heralded single-photon statistics when strongly reducing emission probabilities. Boson sampling with only single-photon input has thus never been realized. Here, we report on a boson-sampling device operated with a bright solid-state source of single-photon Fock states with high photon-number purity: the emission from an efficient and deterministic quantum dot-micropillar system is demultiplexed into three partially indistinguishable single photons, with a single-photon purity 1-g^{(2)}(0) of 0.990±0.001, interfering in a linear optics network. Our demultiplexed source is between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude more efficient than current heralded multiphoton sources based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion, allowing us to complete the boson-sampling experiment faster than previous equivalent implementations.
Quantum advantage, benchmarking the computational power of quantum machines outperforming all classical computers in a specific task, represents a crucial milestone in developing quantum computers and has been driving different physical implementations since the concept was proposed. A boson sampling machine, an analog quantum computer that only requires multiphoton interference and single-photon detection, is considered to be a promising candidate to reach this goal. However, the probabilistic nature of photon sources and the inevitable loss in evolution network make the execution time exponentially increasing with the problem size. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a timestamp boson sampling scheme that can effectively reduce the execution time for any problem size. By developing a time-of-flight storage technique with a precision up to picosecond level, we are able to detect and record the complete time information of 30 individual modes out of a large-scale 3D photonic chip. We perform the three-photon injection and one external trigger experiment to demonstrate that the timestamp protocol works properly and effectively reduce the execution time. We further verify that timestamp boson sampler is distinguished from other samplers in the case of limited datasets through the three heralded single photons injection experiment. The timestamp protocol can speed up the sampling process, which can be widely applied in multiphoton experiments at low-sampling rate. The approach associated with newly exploited resource from time information can boost all the count-rate-limited experiments, suggesting an emerging field of timestamp quantum optics.
Quantum computing experiments are moving into a new realm of increasing size and complexity, with the short-term goal of demonstrating an advantage over classical computers. Boson sampling is a promising platform for such a goal; however, the number of detected single photons is up to five so far, limiting these small-scale implementations to a proof-of-principle stage. Here, we develop solid-state sources of highly efficient, pure, and indistinguishable single photons and 3D integration of ultralow-loss optical circuits. We perform experiments with 20 pure single photons fed into a 60-mode interferometer. In the output, we detect up to 14 photons and sample over Hilbert spaces with a size up to 3.7×10^{14}, over 10 orders of magnitude larger than all previous experiments, which for the first time enters into a genuine sampling regime where it becomes impossible to exhaust all possible output combinations. The results are validated against distinguishable samplers and uniform samplers with a confidence level of 99.9%.