*ITAMP Topical Lunch Discussion*
Date: Friday, October 16th
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
Pizza will be served.
Location: B-106 @ Center for Astrophysics (60 Garden Street)
Directions: after entering the lobby of the CfA, turn right to enter the
hallway of the B building. In the hallway, turn right again, and B-106
is there.
*Speaker:*Gian Guerreschi , Harvard
*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.
--
Stefan Pabst
ITAMP Postdoc
Alexander von Humboldt Fellow
ITAMP, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
60 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
phone: +1-617-495-7239
fax: +1-617-496-7668
email: stefan.pabst(a)cfa.harvard.edu
website:
www.stefanpabst.name