Reconfigurable continuously-coupled 3D photonic circuit for Boson Sampling experiments

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a compact, reconfigurable 3D photonic circuit platform capable of implementing large-scale interferometers for Boson Sampling, advancing quantum photonic computing with multi-photon experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel 3D-integrated photonic platform that is reconfigurable and scalable for Boson Sampling experiments, enabling arbitrary unitary transformations.

Findings

Successfully performed 3- and 4-photon Boson Sampling experiments.

Showed the circuit's ability to implement various unitary transformations.

Indicated potential for scaling to larger photon and mode numbers.

Abstract

Boson Sampling is a computational paradigm representing one of the most viable and pursued approaches to demonstrate the regime of quantum advantage. Recent results have demonstrated significant technological leaps in single-photon generation and detection, leading to progressively larger experimental instances of Boson Sampling experiments in different photonic systems. However, a crucial requirement for a fully-fledged platform solving this problem is the capability of implementing large-scale interferometers, that must simultaneously exhibit low losses, high degree of reconfigurability and the realization of arbitrary transformations. In this work, we move a step forward in this direction by demonstrating the adoption of a compact and reconfigurable 3D-integrated platform for photonic Boson Sampling. We perform 3- and 4-photon experiments by using such platform, showing the possibility of programming the circuit to implement a large number of unitary transformations. These results show that such compact and highly-reconfigurable layout can be scaled up to experiments with larger number of photons and modes, and can provide a viable direction for hybrid computing with photonic processors.