The news is more-or-less what the title says!<\/p>\n
In Science<\/em>, a group led by Anthony Laing\u00a0at Bristol has now\u00a0reported BosonSampling with 6 photons<\/a>, beating their own previous record<\/a> of 5 photons, as well as the earlier record<\/a> of 4 photons achieved a few years ago by the Walmsley group at Oxford (as well as the 3-photon experiments done by groups around the world). \u00a0I only learned\u00a0the big news from a commenter on this blog<\/a>, after the paper was already published (protip: if you’ve pushed forward the BosonSampling frontier, feel free to shoot me an email about it).<\/p>\n As several people explain in the comments, the main<\/em> advance in the paper is arguably not increasing the number of photons, but rather the fact that the device is completely reconfigurable: you can try hundreds of different unitary transformations with the same chip.\u00a0 In addition, the 3-photon results have an unprecedentedly high fidelity (about 95%).<\/p>\n The 6-photon results are, of course, consistent with quantum mechanics: the transition amplitudes are indeed given by permanents of 6\u00d76 complex matrices. \u00a0Key sentence:<\/p>\n After collecting 15 sixfold coincidence events, a confidence of P = 0.998 was determined that these are drawn from a quantum (not classical) distribution.<\/p>\n No one said scaling BosonSampling would be easy: I’m guessing that it\u00a0took weeks of data-gathering to get those 15 coincidence events. \u00a0Scaling up further will probably require improvements to the sources.<\/p>\n There’s also a caveat: their initial state consisted of 2 modes with 3 photons each, as opposed to\u00a0what we really<\/em> want, which is 6 modes with 1 photon each. \u00a0(Likewise, in the Walmsley group’s 4-photon experiments, the initial state consisted of 2 modes with 2 photons each.) \u00a0If the number of modes stayed\u00a02 forever, then the output distributions would remain\u00a0easy to sample with a classical computer no matter how many photons we had, since we’d then get permanents of matrices with only 2 distinct rows. \u00a0So “scaling up” needs\u00a0to mean increasing not only the number of photons, but also the number of sources.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, this is an obvious step forward, and it came sooner than I expected.\u00a0 Huge congratulations to the authors on their accomplishment!<\/p>\n But you might ask: given that\u00a06\u00d76 permanents are still pretty easy for a classical computer (the more so when the matrices have only 2 distinct rows), why should anyone care? \u00a0Well, the new result has major implications for what I’ve always regarded as the central goal of quantum computing research, much more important than breaking RSA or Grover search or even quantum simulation: namely,\u00a0getting Gil Kalai to admit he was wrong<\/em>. \u00a0Gil is on record, repeatedly, on this blog as well as his\u00a0(see for example\u00a0here<\/a>),\u00a0as saying that he doesn’t think BosonSampling will ever be possible even with 7 or 8 photons. \u00a0I don’t know whether the 6-photon result is giving him second thoughts (or sixth thoughts?) about that prediction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The news is more-or-less what the title says! In Science, a group led by Anthony Laing\u00a0at Bristol has now\u00a0reported BosonSampling with 6 photons, beating their own previous record of 5 photons, as well as the earlier record of 4 photons achieved a few years ago by the Walmsley group at Oxford (as well as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31,5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-complexity","category-quantum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2435"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2441,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2435\/revisions\/2441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![here<\/a>),\u00a0as saying that he doesn’t think BosonSampling will ever be possible even with 7 or 8 photons. \u00a0I don’t know whether the 6-photon result is giving him second thoughts (or sixth thoughts?) about that prediction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The news is more-or-less what the title says! In Science, a group led by Anthony Laing\u00a0at Bristol has now\u00a0reported BosonSampling with 6 photons, beating their own previous record of 5 photons, as well as the earlier record of 4 photons achieved a few years ago by the Walmsley group at Oxford (as well as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31,5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-complexity","category-quantum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2435"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2441,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2435\/revisions\/2441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/gilkalai.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/06\/aiq7.png\"){kind=link}