Achievement

Quantum computers are unnecessary for exponentially efficient computation or simulation if the Extended Church-Turing thesis is correct. The thesis would be strongly contradicted by physical devices that efficiently perform tasks believed to be intractable for classical computers. Such a task is boson sampling: sampling the output distributions of n bosons scattered by some passive, linear unitary process. In work co-authored by iQuISE IGERT faculty member Scott Aaronson and iQuISE Associate Justin Dove, the central premise of boson sampling is tested, experimentally verifying that three-photon scattering amplitudes are given by the permanents of submatrices generated from a unitary describing a six-mode integrated optical circuit. The protocol is found to be robust, working even with the unavoidable effects of photon loss, non-ideal sources, and imperfect detection. Scaling this to large numbers of photons should be a much simpler task than building a universal quantum computer.