Photonic Boson Sampling in a Tunable Circuit

• Autores: Alessandro Fedrizzi, Saleh Rahimi Keshari, Justin Dove
• Localización: Science, ISSN 0036-8075, Vol. 339, Nº 6121, 2013, págs. 795-798
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Quantum computers are unnecessary for exponentially efficient computation or simulation if the Extended Church-Turing thesis is correct. The thesis would be strongly contradicted by physical devices that efficiently perform tasks believed to be intractable for classical computers. Such a task is boson sampling: sampling the output distributions of n bosons scattered by some passive, linear unitary process. We tested the central premise of boson sampling, experimentally verifying that three-photon scattering amplitudes are given by the permanents of submatrices generated from a unitary describing a six-mode integrated optical circuit. We find the protocol to be robust, working even with the unavoidable effects of photon loss, non-ideal sources, and imperfect detection. Scaling this to large numbers of photons should be a much simpler task than building a universal quantum computer.