Published January 5, 2022 | Version v1
Journal article Open

Quantum computational advantage via high-dimensional Gaussian boson sampling

  • 1. University of Maryland
  • 2. Xanadu Quantum Technologies
  • 3. Freie Universität Berlin
  • 4. University of Chicago
  • 5. Universität Ulm

Description

Photonics is a promising platform for demonstrating a quantum computational advantage (QCA) by outperforming the most powerful classical supercomputers on a well-defined computational task. Despite this promise, existing proposals and demonstrations face challenges. Experimentally, current implementations of Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) lack programmability or have prohibitive loss rates. Theoretically, there is a comparative lack of rigorous evidence for the classical hardness of GBS. In this work, we make progress in improving both the theoretical evidence and experimental prospects. We provide evidence for the hardness of GBS, comparable to the strongest theoretical proposals for QCA. We also propose a QCA architecture we call high-dimensional GBS, which is programmable and can be implemented with low loss using few optical components. We show that particular algorithms for simulating GBS are outperformed by high-dimensional GBS experiments at modest system sizes. This work thus opens the path to demonstrating QCA with programmable photonic processors.

Data availability

All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials.

Files

sciadv.abi7894.pdf

Files (1.1 MB)

Name Size Download all
Article
md5:d8dedd5a533051c427fa3cdbf0f06a85
397.0 kB Preview Download
Supplementary materials
md5:5cfb651783009f7ab87299bbcf7bedb1
693.1 kB Preview Download

Additional details

Identifiers

DOI
10.1126/sciadv.abi7894
Other
oai:uchicago.tind.io:11026

Funding

European Commission
817482
IBM (Canada)
Canada Foundation for Innovation
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
EI 519/21-1
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
EI 519/14-1
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
CRC 183
Federal Ministry of Education and Research
MATH+ Cluster of Excellence
Ontario Research Fund
Federal Economic Development Agency of Southern Ontario
Mitacs

UChicago Information

Division(s)
Physical Sciences Division
Department(s)
Computer Science