Toward Scalable Boson Sampling with Photon Loss

Hui Wang; Wei Li; Xiao Jiang; Y-M He; Y-H Li; X Ding; M-C Chen; J Qin; C-Z Peng; C Schneider; M Kamp; W-J Zhang; H Li; L-X You; Z Wang; J P Dowling; S Höfling; Chao-Yang Lu; Jian-Wei Pan

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.230502

Toward Scalable Boson Sampling with Photon Loss

Phys Rev Lett. 2018 Jun 8;120(23):230502. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.230502.

Authors

Hui Wang^{1

2

3}, Wei Li^{1

2

3}, Xiao Jiang^{1

2

3}, Y-M He^{1

2

3}, Y-H Li^{1

2

3}, X Ding^{1

2

3}, M-C Chen^{1

2

3}, J Qin^{1

2

3}, C-Z Peng^{1

2

3}, C Schneider⁴, M Kamp⁴, W-J Zhang⁵, H Li⁵, L-X You⁵, Z Wang⁵, J P Dowling^{6

7}, S Höfling^{1

4

8}, Chao-Yang Lu^{1

2

3}, Jian-Wei Pan^{1

2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Shanghai Branch, National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China, Shanghai 201315, China.
² CAS Center for Excellence and Synergetic Innovation Center in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China.
³ CAS-Alibaba Quantum Computing Laboratory, Shanghai 201315, China.
⁴ Technische Physik, Physikalisches Instität and Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen-Center for Complex Material Systems, Universitat Würzburg, Am Hubland, D-97074 Wüzburg, Germany.
⁵ State Key Laboratory of Functional Materials for Informatics, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology (SIMIT), Chinese Academy of Sciences, 865 Changning Road, Shanghai 200050, China.
⁶ Hearne Institute for Theoretical Physics and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803, USA.
⁷ NYU-ECNU Institute of Physics at NYU Shanghai, Shanghai 200062, China.
⁸ SUPA, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9SS, United Kingdom.

PMID: 29932715
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.230502

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 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.