Simulating single photons with realistic photon sources

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to simulate ideal single photons using imperfect photon sources, enabling quantum tasks to be performed with realistic, non-ideal sources, thus broadening practical quantum information processing capabilities.

Contribution

The paper introduces an efficient simulation technique for approximating single photons with imperfect sources, facilitating quantum tasks without ideal photon sources.

Findings

Simulation accuracy improves with more input photons

Method enables replacement of ideal single photon tasks with imperfect sources

Applicable to quantum computing and quantum key distribution

Abstract

Quantum information processing provides remarkable advantages over its classical counterpart. Quantum optical systems are proved to be sufficient for realizing general quantum tasks, which however often rely on single photon sources. In practice, imperfect single photon sources, such as weak coherent state source, are used instead, which will inevitably limit the power in demonstrating quantum effects. For instance, with imperfect photon sources, the key rate of the BB84 quantum key distribution protocol will be very low, which fortunately can be resolved by utilizing the decoy state method. As a generalization, we investigate an efficient way to simulate single photons with imperfect ones to an arbitrary desired accuracy when the number of photonic inputs is small. Based on this simulator, we can thus replace the tasks that involve only a few single photon inputs with the ones that only make use of imperfect photon sources. In addition, our method also provides a quantum simulator to quantum computation based on quantum optics. In the main context, we take phase randomized coherent state as an example for analysis. A general photon source applies similarly and may provide some further advantages for certain tasks.