Boson sampling is fragile to loss
How to prepare an accurate paper press kit? Illustrated guide
arXiv: 2611.01434v1 · Summary page
Why cover this story this week?
Why more detected photons need not mean harder computation
Boson sampling uses the interference of photons in an optical network to produce distributions intended to be difficult for classical computers to reproduce. A theoretical preprint finds that fixed, nonzero uniform photon loss permits efficient classical sampling in the average case as the system grows. The argument exploits the way loss suppresses correlations involving many photons, allowing the output distribution to be approximated using lower-order correlations.
The result covers specified Fock-state and Gaussian boson-sampling settings, even when the mean detected photon number grows linearly with system size. Its message reaches beyond photonics: increasing an experiment’s size is not enough to establish computational advantage if noise erases the correlations responsible for its difficulty. The guarantee is averaged over Haar-random interferometers, however, rather than applying individually to every possible optical network.
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