Quantum computational advantage using photons

TLDR

Gaussian boson sampling exploits squeezed states to provide a highly efficient way to demonstrate quantum computational advantage. The experiment uses 50 highly indistinguishable single‑mode squeezed states fed into a 100‑mode ultralow‑loss interferometer with full connectivity, sampled by 100 high‑efficiency single‑photon detectors, with the optical setup phase‑locked to preserve coherence among all photon‑number superpositions and the resulting samples validated against thermal, distinguishable‑photon, and uniform‑distribution hypotheses. We observe up to 76 output photon‑clicks, yielding an output state‑space dimension of 10^30 and a sampling rate 10^14 times faster than the state‑of‑the‑art simulation strategy and supercomputers.

Abstract

Gaussian boson sampling exploits squeezed states to provide a highly efficient way to demonstrate quantum computational advantage. We perform experiments with 50 input single-mode squeezed states with high indistinguishability and squeezing parameters, which are fed into a 100-mode ultralow-loss interferometer with full connectivity and random transformation, and sampled using 100 high-efficiency single-photon detectors. The whole optical set-up is phase-locked to maintain a high coherence between the superposition of all photon number states. We observe up to 76 output photon-clicks, which yield an output state space dimension of $10^{30}$ and a sampling rate that is $10^{14}$ faster than using the state-of-the-art simulation strategy and supercomputers. The obtained samples are validated against various hypotheses including using thermal states, distinguishable photons, and uniform distribution.