High-efficiency multiphoton boson sampling

Abstract

Boson sampling is considered as a strong candidate to demonstrate the “quantum computational supremacy” over classical computers. However, previous proof-of-principle experiments suffered from small photon number and low sampling rates owing to the inefficiencies of the single-photon sources and multi-port optical interferometers. Here, we develop two central components for high-performance boson sampling: robust multi-photon interferometers with 99% transmission rate, and actively demultiplexed single-photon sources from a quantum-dot-micropillar with simultaneously high efficiency, purity and indistinguishability. We implement and validate three-, four-, and five-photon boson sampling, and achieve sampling rates of 4.96 kHz, 151 Hz, and 4 Hz, respectively, which are over 24,000 times faster than the previous experiments. Our architecture is feasible to be scaled up to larger number of photons and with higher rate to race against classical computers, and might provide experimental evidence against the Extended Church-Turing Thesis.