TY - JOUR T1 - Quantum computational advantage via high-dimensional Gaussian boson sampling JF - Science Advances Y1 - 2022 A1 - Abhinav Deshpande A1 - Arthur Mehta A1 - Trevor Vincent A1 - Nicolas Quesada A1 - Marcel Hinsche A1 - Marios Ioannou A1 - Lars Madsen A1 - Jonathan Lavoie A1 - Haoyu Qi A1 - Jens Eisert A1 - Dominik Hangleiter A1 - Bill Fefferman A1 - Ish Dhand AB -

A programmable quantum computer based on fiber optics outperforms classical computers with a high level of confidence. Photonics is a promising platform for demonstrating a quantum computational advantage (QCA) by outperforming the most powerful classical supercomputers on a well-defined computational task. Despite this promise, existing proposals and demonstrations face challenges. Experimentally, current implementations of Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) lack programmability or have prohibitive loss rates. Theoretically, there is a comparative lack of rigorous evidence for the classical hardness of GBS. In this work, we make progress in improving both the theoretical evidence and experimental prospects. We provide evidence for the hardness of GBS, comparable to the strongest theoretical proposals for QCA. We also propose a QCA architecture we call high-dimensional GBS, which is programmable and can be implemented with low loss using few optical components. We show that particular algorithms for simulating GBS are outperformed by high-dimensional GBS experiments at modest system sizes. This work thus opens the path to demonstrating QCA with programmable photonic processors.

VL - 8 U4 - eabi7894 UR - https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/sciadv.abi7894 U5 - 10.1126/sciadv.abi7894 ER -