Quantum computational advantage with a programmable photonic processor

🤖 Plain-English Summary

Abstract A quantum computer attains computational advantage when outperforming the best classical computers running the best-known algorithms on well-defined tasks. Ours constitutes a very large GBS experiment, registering events with up to 219 photons and a mean photon number of 125.

🔑 Key Findings

• No photonic machine offering programmability over all its quantum gates has demonstrated quantum computational advantage: previous machines 1,2 were largely restricted to static gate sequences.
• Earlier photonic demonstrations were also vulnerable to spoofing 3 , in which classical heuristics produce samples, without direct simulation, lying closer to the ideal distribution than do samples from the quantum hardware.
• Here we report quantum computational advantage using Borealis, a photonic processor offering dynamic programmability on all gates implemented.

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