A researcher at the UT has proposed a novel quantum interference experiment. This result could lead to new applications for photonic quantum computers. The results were published in Physical Review A.
At the University of Twente, we study the applications of photonic quantum interference: systems where the paths of a large number of photons (particles of light) meet. When photons encounter each other they interact, forming a large, complex quantum state. Such quantum states could be used to solve computational problems that are not accessible to our current computers.
However, a restriction to this approach to quantum computing is that the way in which the photons encounter each other must be arranged very carefully, otherwise we are not sure whether we are really dealing with a case where the quantum interference outperforms all possible calculations that a classical computer could do (a case known as ‘quantum advantage’), which is a precondition to use the state for a quantum computation.
A researcher at the UT has found mathematical evidence of a new class of quantum states for which quantum outperforms classical. The evidence points towards the fact that superposition states – states which simultaneously contain and do not contain a photon – possess a quantum advantage. This extends the set of quantum interference problems into which we can program problems with real world applications.
The research has been done in the Complex Photonic Systems group, part of UT’s MESA+ Institute and the new Centre for Quantum Nanotechnology Twente (QUANT).
The paper ‘Simulability of partially distinguishable superposition and Gaussian boson sampling’, by Jelmer Renema, was published in the latest edition of Physical Review A, one of the journals of the American Physical Society
