High-dimensional unitary transformations and boson sampling on temporal modes using dispersive optics

• Main Authors: Pant, Mihir (Contributor), Englund, Dirk Robert (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Physical Society, 2016-04-04T23:00:48Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

A major challenge for postclassical boson sampling experiments is the need for a large number of coupled optical modes, detectors, and single-photon sources. Here we show that these requirements can be greatly eased by time-bin encoding and dispersive optics-based unitary transformations. Detecting consecutively heralded photons after time-independent dispersion performs boson sampling from unitaries for which an efficient classical algorithm is lacking. We also show that time-dependent dispersion can implement general single-particle unitary operations. More generally, this scheme promises an efficient architecture for a range of other linear optics experiments.
United States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (Grant FA9550-14-1-0052)