Hi everyone,

Tomorrow Gian will give group meeting at 2:30 PM in the Div Room. The title and abstract are below.

This is the last group meeting at the 2:30 PM slot for this semester - next week we switch to the Wednesday 11 slot (so next group meeting will be a week from today on October 21st).

Best,

Ian

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Speaker: Gian Giacomo Guerreschi
Title: Boson Sampling: Towards practical applications and scalable implementations

Abstract: Boson sampling, namely the problem of sampling from the output distribution of passive linear optical networks, is strongly believed to be intractable on any classical computer, but efficiently solved with the corresponding quantum optical setup. For this reason, boson sampling attracted a lot of interest in relation to complexity-theoretic questions and it may even offer an experimentally realizable challenge to the Extended Church-Turing thesis. At the same time, current boson sampling realizations with photonic networks present scalability issues, like deterministic single photon generation and detection, which need to be addressed.

In this talk, I will show that the successful development of a boson sampling apparatus would not only answer abstract complexity questions, but also yield a practical tool for difficult molecular computations. Specifically, I will show that a boson sampling device with a modified input state can be used to generate molecular vibronic spectra, including complicated effects such as Duschinsky rotations.

Finally, I will discuss our recent proposal to implement boson sampling with superconducting circuits. Due to the ability of performing deterministic state preparation and high-fidelity photon detection, we believe that this architecture constitutes the most realistic implementation of fully scalable boson sampling.