Sample-efficient benchmarking of multi-photon interference on a boson sampler in the sparse regime

Understand

Verification of a quantum advantage in the presence of noise is a key open problem in the study of near-term quantum devices.

• In this work, we show how to assess the quality of photonic interference in a linear optical quantum device (boson sampler) by using a maximum likelihood method to measure the strength at which various noise sources are present in the experiment.
• This allows us to use a sparse set of samples to test whether a given boson sampling experiment meets known upper bounds on the level of noise permissible to demonstrate a quantum advantage.
• Furthermore, this method allows us monitor the evolution of noise in real time, creating a valuable diagnostic tool.