S. Sempere-Llagostera

Gaussian boson sampling is a quantum computing concept based on drawing samples from a multimode nonclassical Gaussian state using photon-number resolving detectors. It was initially posed as a near-term approach to achieve quantum advantage, and several applications have been proposed since, including the calculation of graph features. For the first time, we use a time-bin encoded interferometer to implement Gaussian boson sampling experimentally and extract samples to enhance the search for dense subgraphs in a graph. Our results indicate an improvement over classical methods for subgraphs of sizes three and four in a graph containing ten nodes. In addition, we numerically explore the role of imperfections in the optical circuit and on the performance of the algorithm.

Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) is a quantum sampling task in which one has to draw samples from the photon-number distribution of a large-dimensional nonclassical squeezed state of light. In an effort to make this task intractable for a classical computer, experiments building GBS machines have mainly focused on increasing the dimensionality and squeezing strength of the nonclassical light. However, no experiment has yet demonstrated the ability to displace the squeezed state in phase space, which is generally required for practical applications of GBS. In this work, we build a GBS machine that achieves the displacement by injecting a laser beam alongside a two-mode squeezed vacuum state into a 15-mode interferometer. We focus on two new capabilities. Firstly, we use the displacement to reconstruct the multimode Gaussian state at the output of the interferometer. Our reconstruction technique is in situ and requires only three measurement settings regardless of the state dimension. Secondly, we study how the addition of classical laser light in our GBS machine affects the complexity of sampling its output photon statistics. We introduce and validate approximate semiclassical models that reduce the computational cost when a significant fraction of the detected light is classical.