Sufficient conditions for hardness of lossy Gaussian boson sampling

TL;DR

This paper establishes the conditions under which noisy Gaussian boson sampling remains computationally hard, focusing on photon loss thresholds and providing a foundation for demonstrating quantum advantage in practical, imperfect systems.

Contribution

It provides the first rigorous criteria for the classical intractability of lossy GBS, identifying loss thresholds and quantifying the impact of noise on complexity.

Findings

Loss threshold identified where lossy GBS remains hard

Intractability holds when at most a logarithmic fraction of photons are lost

Quantified the statistical distance between ideal and lossy GBS

Abstract

Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) is a prominent candidate for the experimental demonstration of quantum advantage. However, while the current implementations of GBS are unavoidably subject to noise, the robustness of the classical intractability of GBS against noise remains largely unexplored. In this work, we establish the complexity-theoretic foundations for the classical intractability of noisy GBS under photon loss, which is a dominant source of imperfection in current implementations. We identify the loss threshold below which lossy GBS maintains the same complexity-theoretic level as ideal GBS, and show that this holds when at most a logarithmic fraction of photons is lost. We additionally derive an intractability criterion for the loss rate through a direct quantification of the statistical distance between ideal and lossy GBS. This work presents the first rigorous characterization of classically intractable regimes of lossy GBS, thereby serving as a crucial step toward demonstrating quantum advantage with near-term implementations.