Clarendon Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Science. 2013 Feb 15;339(6121):798-801. doi: 10.1126/science.1231692. Epub 2012 Dec 20.
Although universal quantum computers ideally solve problems such as factoring integers exponentially more efficiently than classical machines, the formidable challenges in building such devices motivate the demonstration of simpler, problem-specific algorithms that still promise a quantum speedup. We constructed a quantum boson-sampling machine (QBSM) to sample the output distribution resulting from the nonclassical interference of photons in an integrated photonic circuit, a problem thought to be exponentially hard to solve classically. Unlike universal quantum computation, boson sampling merely requires indistinguishable photons, linear state evolution, and detectors. We benchmarked our QBSM with three and four photons and analyzed sources of sampling inaccuracy. Scaling up to larger devices could offer the first definitive quantum-enhanced computation.
虽然通用量子计算机在理想情况下可以更有效地解决指数级分解整数等问题，比经典机器，但构建此类设备所面临的艰巨挑战促使人们展示更简单、特定于问题的算法，这些算法仍然有望实现量子加速。我们构建了一个量子玻色子抽样机（QBSM）来抽样由集成光子电路中光子的非经典干涉产生的输出分布，这个问题在经典计算中被认为是指数级困难的。与通用量子计算不同，玻色子抽样仅需要不可区分的光子、线性状态演化和探测器。我们使用三个和四个光子对我们的 QBSM 进行了基准测试，并分析了抽样不准确的原因。扩展到更大的设备可能会提供第一个明确的量子增强计算。
