Xanadu: Quantum advantage with Gaussian Boson Sampling analysis

Illustration of the experimental setup used by Zhong et al. in Quantum computational advantage using photons
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Xanadu’s team has just released a very interesting and well-detailed post related to the recent Chinese Quantum advantage claim using quantum photonics.

Here are some quotes and excerpts. We encourage you to read all the tutorial and practices the examples using Xanadu’s PennyLane-Strawberry Fields plugin.

On the journey to large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers, one of the first major milestones is to demonstrate a quantum device carrying out tasks that are beyond the reach of any classical algorithm. The Google Quantum team was the first to claim this achievement, announced in their paper Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor. Now a team led by Chao-Yang Lu and Jian-Wei Pan has performed a similar feat using quantum photonics. While Google’s experiment performed the task of random circuit sampling using a superconducting processor, the new experiment, published in the paper Quantum computational advantage using photons leverages the quantum properties of light to tackle a task called Gaussian Boson Sampling (GBS).

This tutorial will walk you through the basic elements of GBS, motivate why it is classically challenging, and show you how to explore GBS using PennyLane and the photonic quantum devices accessible via the PennyLane-Strawberry Fields plugin. If you are interested in possible applications of GBS, or want to access programmable GBS hardware via the cloud, check out the Strawberry Fields website for more details.

This tutorial can be read there.