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AVS Quantum Science

Estimating Fock-state linear optics evolution using coherent states

Austin P. Lund

Published Feb 28, 2023• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This paper presents two methods for simulating the interference of bosonic Fock states through linear interferometers using coherent states. The first method repeats the interferometer, injects coherent states in particular modes, and uses symmetric combinations of the outputs to reconstruct the state amplitudes of the Fock-state interference. The second method constructs a new interferometer that can be probed with coherent states on individual inputs to extract the required state amplitudes. The two approaches here show explicitly where the classical computational difficultly arises. In the first approach, the computational hardness is in the measurement post-processing, and in the second approach, it is within the construction of the required state evolution.

DOI
10.1116/5.0136828

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This paper presents two methods for simulating the interference of bosonic Fock states through linear interferometers using coherent states. The first method repeats the interferometer, injects coherent states in particular modes, and uses symmetric combinations of the outputs to reconstruct the state amplitudes of the Fock-state interference. The second method constructs a new interferometer that can be probed with coherent states on individual inputs to extract the required state amplitudes. The two approaches here show explicitly where the classical computational difficultly arises. In the first approach, the computational hardness is in the measurement post-processing, and in the second approach, it is within the construction of the required state evolution.
Photon-number Fock states play important roles in quantum optics. However, the generation of the states are very difficult because of the lack of large effective nonlinearities. In this Rapid Communication, I show a scheme to produce the Fock state from an input coherent state by using only linear optics method and projection measurements. I analyze the case of five-photon number state generation from coherent states for a specific case of the scheme. It is possible to remove the vacuum state from the output state when one introduces quantum nondemolition measurement that can also be implemented with all linear optics setup.
Boson sampling is a specific quantum computation, which is likely hard to implement efficiently on a classical computer. The task is to sample the output photon-number distribution of a linear-optical interferometric network, which is fed with single-photon Fock-state inputs. A question that has been asked is if the sampling problems associated with any other input quantum states of light (other than the Fock states) to a linear-optical network and suitable output detection strategies are also of similar computational complexity as boson sampling. We consider the states that differ from the Fock states by a displacement operation, namely the displaced Fock states and the photon-added coherent states. It is easy to show that the sampling problem associated with displaced single-photon Fock states and a displaced photon-number detection scheme is in the same complexity class as boson sampling for all values of displacement. On the other hand, we show that the sampling problem associated with single-photon-added coherent states and the same displaced photon-number detection scheme demonstrates a computational-complexity transition. It transitions from being just as hard as boson sampling when the input coherent amplitudes are sufficiently small to a classically simulatable problem in the limit of large coherent amplitudes.
Photonic qubits play an important role in quantum information processing. However, to date, efficient high-speed single photon sources and photon number resolving (PNR) detectors are still difficult to make. Here, we use phase-randomized coherent states and threshold detectors, combined with decoy-state post-processing, to simulate single photon sources and PNR detectors and perform various quantum information processing tasks. We propose a simple linear regression method to predict Fock state statistics based on observable statistics from coherent-state probes, combined with random/structured sampling of probe settings. Compared with traditional decoy-state post-processing based on linear programming and Cartesian product grid sampling, our method enables drastically improved accuracy and much reduced probe resources. It works particularly well for unknown unitary circuits of interest with fixed-size Hilbert space dimensions. For instance, it can accurately simulate 4-photon interference in linear optics with just 32 input/output probe settings and 6-photon interference with 256 probe settings. Moreover, it also works for non-unitary (such as lossy, nonlinear, or arbitrary) quantum channels. This enables a wide variety of applications that can be implemented with easily attainable coherent light sources and threshold detectors, such as characterization of small-scale linear optical quantum computing circuits or quantum sensing/metrology devices.
Get PDF Email Share Share with Facebook Tweet This Post on reddit Share with LinkedIn Add to CiteULike Add to Mendeley Add to BibSonomy Get Citation Copy Citation Text J. P. Dowling, "Classical Computers Can Not Efficiently Simulate Multimode Linear Optical Interferometers with Arbitrary Fock-State Inputs," in The Rochester Conferences on Coherence and Quantum Optics and the Quantum Information and Measurement meeting, OSA Technical Digest (online) (Optica Publishing Group, 2013), paper W5B.1. Export Citation BibTex Endnote (RIS) HTML Plain Text Citation alert Save article
Aaronson and Arkhipov recently used computational complexity theory to argue that classical computers very likely cannot efficiently simulate linear, multimode, quantum-optical interferometers with arbitrary Fock-state inputs [Aaronson and Arkhipov, Theory Comput. 9, 143 (2013)]. Here we present an elementary argument that utilizes only techniques from quantum optics. We explicitly construct the Hilbert space for such an interferometer and show that its dimension scales exponentially with all the physical resources. We also show in a simple example just how the Schr\"odinger and Heisenberg pictures of quantum theory, while mathematically equivalent, are not in general computationally equivalent. Finally, we conclude our argument by comparing the symmetry requirements of multiparticle bosonic to fermionic interferometers and, using simple physical reasoning, connect the nonsimulatability of the bosonic device to the complexity of computing the permanent of a large matrix.
We introduce coherent-state propagation, a computational framework for simulating bosonic systems. We focus on bosonic circuits composed of displaced linear optics augmented by Kerr nonlinearities, a universal model of bosonic quantum computation that is also physically motivated by driven Bose-Hubbard dynamics. The method works in the Schrödinger picture representing the evolving state as a sparse superposition of coherent states. We develop approximation strategies that keep the simulation cost tractable in physically relevant regimes, notably when the number of Kerr gates is small or the Kerr nonlinearities are weak, and prove rigorous guarantees for both observable estimation and sampling. In particular, bosonic circuits with logarithmically many Kerr gates admit quasi-polynomial-time classical simulation at exponentially small error in trace distance. We further identify a weak-nonlinearity regime in which the runtime is polynomial for arbitrarily small constant precision. We complement these results with numerical benchmarks on the Bose-Hubbard model with all-to-all connectivity. The method reproduces Fock-basis and matrix-product-state reference data, suggesting that it offers a useful route to the classical simulation of bosonic systems.