Classical simulation of photonic linear optics with lost particles

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that certain types of particle loss in linear optical systems allow for efficient classical simulation of boson sampling, challenging the prospects of quantum supremacy in these setups.

Contribution

It introduces models of particle loss in boson sampling and proves conditions under which classical simulation becomes feasible, highlighting limitations for quantum advantage.

Findings

Classical simulation is efficient if remaining photons grow slower than √n.

Simulation is possible if the number of beamsplitters traversed grows logarithmically with output modes.

Loss layers can be commuted to the input, simplifying analysis regardless of network geometry.

Abstract

We explore the possibility of efficient classical simulation of linear optics experiments under the effect of particle losses. Specifically, we investigate the canonical boson sampling scenario in which an $n$-particle Fock input state propagates through a linear-optical network and is subsequently measured by particle-number detectors in the $m$ output modes. We examine two models of losses. In the first model a fixed number of particles is lost. We prove that in this scenario the output statistics can be well approximated by an efficient classical simulation, provided that the number of photons that is left grows slower than $\sqrt{n}$. In the second loss model, every time a photon passes through a beamsplitter in the network, it has some probability of being lost. For this model the relevant parameter is $s$, the smallest number of beamsplitters that any photon traverses as it propagates through the network. We prove that it is possible to approximately simulate the output statistics already if $s$ grows logarithmically with $m$, regardless of the geometry of the network. The latter result is obtained by proving that it is always possible to commute $s$ layers of uniform losses to the input of the network regardless of its geometry, which could be a result of independent interest. We believe that our findings put strong limitations on future experimental realizations of quantum computational supremacy proposals based on boson sampling.