Classical simulation of lossy boson sampling using matrix product operators

Understand

Characterizing the computational advantage from noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices is an important task from theoretical and practical perspectives.

• Here, we numerically investigate the computational power of NISQ devices focusing on boson sampling, one of the well-known promising problems which can exhibit quantum supremacy.
• We study hardness of lossy boson sampling using matrix product operator (MPO) simulation to address the effect of photon-loss on classical simulability using MPO entanglement entropy (EE), which characterizes a running time of an MPO algorithm.
• An advantage of MPO simulation over other classical algorithms proposed to date is that its simulation accuracy can be efficiently controlled by increasing an MPO's bond dimension.