Toward Scalable Boson Sampling with Photon Loss

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that allowing photon loss in boson sampling experiments can significantly increase the sampling rate, making large-scale quantum simulations more feasible.

Contribution

The authors experimentally show that boson sampling with photon loss can be faster than standard methods, improving scalability for quantum computing applications.

Findings

Sampling rates are increased by factors of up to 18 with photon loss.

Boson sampling with photon loss is validated for up to seven photons.

Photon loss can be exploited to enhance the efficiency of quantum sampling experiments.

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 ultra-low-loss photonic circuit, and we detect three-, four- and five-fold coincidence counts. We implement and validate lossy boson sampling with one and two photons lost, and obtain sampling rates of 187 kHz, 13.6 kHz, 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.