This was part of
The Power of Near-Term Quantum Experiments
BosonSampling with a linear number of modes
Shaun Datta, Stanford University
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Abstract: BosonSampling is the leading candidate for demonstrating quantum computational advantage in photonic systems. While we have recently seen many impressive experimental demonstrations, there is still a formidable distance between the complexity-theoretic hardness arguments and current experiments. One of the largest gaps involves the ratio of photons to modes—all current hardness evidence assumes a “high-mode” regime in which the number of linear optical modes scales at least quadratically in the number of photons. By contrast, current experiments operate in a “low-mode” regime with a linear number of modes. In this paper we bridge this gap, bringing the hardness evidence for the low-mode experiments to the same level as had been previously established for the high-mode regime. This involves proving a new worst-to-average-case reduction for computing the Permanent which is robust to both large numbers of row repetitions and also to distributions over matrices with correlated entries.