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 mode ultralow-loss photonic circuit, and we detect three-, four- and fivefold coincidence counts. We implement and validate lossy boson sampling with one and two photons lost, and obtain sampling rates of 187, 13.6, 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.
- Received 16 January 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.230502
© 2018 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
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Lost Photons Won’t Derail Quantum Sampling
Published 6 June 2018
A photon-based method for demonstrating the advantage of quantum over classical machines can handle photon loss, facilitating experiments.
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