Generation and Sampling of Quantum States of Light in a Silicon Chip

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The study also investigates possible applications for such near-term photonics quantum processors entering a regime of quantum advantage.

In particular, by reconfiguring the type of optical non-linearity in the chip, they demonstrated that silicon chips can be used to perform a variety of quantum simulation tasks, known as boson sampling problems.

For some of these protocols, for example the Gaussian Boson Sampling, this new demonstration is a world-first.

The team also demonstrated that, using such protocols, silicon quantum devices will be able to solve industrially relevant problems. In particular, they show how the chemical problem of finding the vibrational transitions in molecules undergoing an electronic transformation can be simulated on our type of devices using Gaussian Boson Sampling.

Lead author Dr Stefano Paesani from the University of Bristol’s Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information, said: “Our findings show that photonic quantum simulators surpassing classical supercomputers are a realistic near-term prospect for the silicon quantum photonics platform.

“The development of such quantum machines can have potentially ground-breaking impacts on industrially relevant fields such as chemistry, molecular designing, artificial intelligence, and big-data analysis.

“Applications include the design of better pharmaceutics and the engineering of molecular states able to generate energy more efficiently.”

Co-author, Dr Raffaele Santagati, added: “The results obtained make us confident that the milestone of quantum machines faster than any current classical computers is within reach of the integrated quantum photonics platform.

“While it is true that also other technologies have the capability to reach such regime, for example trapped ions or superconducting systems, the photonics approach has the unique advantage of having the near-term applications we investigated. The photonic path, although perilous, is set, and is very much worth pursuing.”

Professor Anthony Laing, Associate Professor of Physics at Bristol supervised the project. He said: “In quadrupling the number of photons both generated and processed in the same chip, the team have set the scene for scaling up quantum simulators to tens of photons where performance comparisons with today’s standard computing hardware become meaningful.”

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