Digital Quantum Simulations of Hong-Ou-Mandel Interference

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how digital quantum computers can simulate bosonic systems like beam splitters, successfully reproducing Hong-Ou-Mandel interference effects on both simulators and real quantum hardware.

Contribution

It introduces a boson-to-qubit mapping using the gray code and validates quantum simulation of Hong-Ou-Mandel interference on actual quantum devices.

Findings

Successful simulation of Hong-Ou-Mandel interference

Validation on both simulators and real quantum hardware

Effective boson-to-qubit encoding with gray code

Abstract

Digital quantum simulation is the process of simulating the dynamics of a physical system by a programmable quantum computer. The universality of quantum computers makes it possible to simulate any quantum system, whether fermionic or bosonic. In this work, we discuss the application of digital quantum simulations to simulate a ubiquitous bosonic system, a beam splitter. To perform the boson-to-qubit mapping, we used the gray code, whose superiority over other encoding schemes has been shown recently. We validated our quantum circuit that mimics the action of a beam splitter by simulating the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference experiment. We simulated the experiment in both quantum simulators and actual quantum backends and were able to observe the HOM interference.