Boson-sampling with photons of arbitrary spectral structure

Abstract

Boson-sampling has attracted much interest as a simplified approach to implementing a subset of optical quantum computing. Boson-sampling requires indistinguishable photons, but far fewer of them than universal optical quantum computing architectures. In reality, photons are never indistinguishable, and exhibit a rich spectral structure. Here we consider the operation of boson-sampling with photons of arbitrary spectral structure and relate the sampling statistics of the device to matrix permanents. This sheds light on the computational complexity of different regimes of the photons' spectral characteristics, and provides very general results for the operation of linear optics interferometers in the presence of partially distinguishable photons. Our results apply to both the cases of spectrally resolving and non-spectrally resolving detectors.

References in corpus (3)

• Spectral structure and decompositions of optical states, and their applications
• Frequency and temporal effects in linear optical quantum computing
• Optical quantum computing with photons of arbitrarily low fidelity and purity

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Sampling of partially distinguishable bosons and the relation to the multidimensional permanent
• Partial indistinguishability theory for multi-photon experiments in multiport devices
• Multiboson Correlation Interferometry with arbitrary single-photon pure states
• Sampling arbitrary photon-added or photon-subtracted squeezed states is in the same complexity class as boson sampling
• Partial distinguishability and photon counting probabilities in linear multiport devices
• Experimental linear optical computing of the matrix permanent
• Distinguishability theory for time-resolved photodetection and boson sampling