Quantum Computers Approach Milestone for Boson Sampling

Xiao‐Wei Wang, Wen-Hao Zhou, Yu-Xuan Fu +9 more

Boson sampling is a computational problem, which is commonly believed to be a representative paradigm for attaining the milestone of quantum advantage. So far, massive efforts have been made to the experimental large-scale boson sampling for demonstrating this milestone, while further applications of the machines remain a largely unexplored area. Here, we investigate experimentally the efficiency and security of a cryptographic one-way function that relies on coarse-grained boson sampling, in the framework of a photonic boson-sampling machine fabricated by a femtosecond laser direct writing technique. Our findings demonstrate that the implementation of the function requires moderate sample sizes, which can be over 4 orders of magnitude smaller than the ones predicted by the Chernoff bound; whereas for numbers of photons n≥3 and bins d∼poly(m,n), the same output of the function cannot be generated by nonboson samplers. Our Letter is the first experimental study that deals with the potential applications of boson sampling in the field of cryptography and paves the way toward additional studies in this direction.

Anonymous

Ulysse Chabaud, Frédéric Grosshans, Elham Kashefi +1 more

The demonstration of quantum speedup, also known as quantum computational supremacy, that is the ability of quantum computers to outperform dramatically their classical counterparts, is an important milestone in the field of quantum computing. While quantum speedup experiments are gradually escaping the regime of classical simulation, they still lack efficient verification protocols and rely on partial validation. Here we derive an efficient protocol for verifying with single-mode Gaussian measurements the output states of a large class of continuous-variable quantum circuits demonstrating quantum speedup, including Boson Sampling experiments, thus enabling a convincing demonstration of quantum speedup with photonic computing. Beyond the quantum speedup milestone, our results also enable the efficient and reliable certification of a large class of intractable continuous-variable multimode quantum states.

Alex Neville, Chris Sparrow

Zhaorong Fu, Jueming Bao, Jianwei Wang

Jun Gao, Zhi‐Qiang Jiao, Ruo-Jing Ren +5 more

Quantum computation, aiming at tackling hard problems beyond classical approaches, has been flourishing with each passing day. Unfortunately, a fully scalable and fault-tolerant universal quantum computer remains challenging based on the current technology. Boson sampling, first proposed by Aaronson and Arkhipov, is commonly believed as the most promising candidate to reach the intermediate quantum computational milestone, namely, quantum supremacy. Following this leading proposal, many experimental implementations as well as variants of boson sampling have been shown. However, most of these works are limited to small scale and cannot fulfill the permanent-of-Gaussians conjecture. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the largest scale boson sampling in the collision-free dominant regime using multi-port interferometer in a 3D photonic chip. We measure all 6,545 no-collision output combinations and validate the experimental results. Our work shows the potential of 3D photonic chip platform and represents a solid step toward large scale boson sampling.