Time-Bin-Encoded Boson Sampling with a Single-Photon Device

Authors: Yu He, Xing Ding, Zu-En Su, He-Liang Huang, Jian Qin, Can Wang, Sebastian Unsleber, C. Chen, Hui Wang, Yu He, Xi‐Lin Wang, W.-J. Zhang, S.-J. Chen, C. Schneider, M. Kamp, Lixing You, Zijian Wang, Sven Höfling, Chao‐Yang Lu, Jian-Wei Pan - Physical Review Letters 2017 cited by 176

Boson sampling is a problem strongly believed to be intractable for classical computers, but can be naturally solved on a specialized photonic quantum simulator. Here, we implement the first time-bin-encoded boson sampling using a highly indistinguishable (∼94%) single-photon source based on a single quantum-dot-micropillar device. The protocol requires only one single-photon source, two detectors, and a loop-based interferometer for an arbitrary number of photons. The single-photon pulse train is time-bin encoded and deterministically injected into an electrically programmable multimode network. The observed three- and four-photon boson sampling rates are 18.8 and 0.2 Hz, respectively, which are more than 100 times faster than previous experiments based on parametric down-conversion.