Spontaneous parametric down-conversion photon sources are scalable in the asymptotic limit for boson-sampling

Abstract

Boson-sampling has emerged as a promising avenue towards post-classical optical quantum computation, and numerous elementary demonstrations have recently been performed. Spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) is the mainstay for single-photon state preparation, the technique employed in most optical quantum information processing implementations to-date. Here we present a simple architecture for boson-sampling based on multiplexed SPDC sources and demonstrate that the architecture is limited only by the post-selection detection efficiency assuming that other errors, such as spectral impurity, dark counts, and interferometric instability are negligible. For any given number of input photons, there exists a minimum detector efficiency that allows post selection. If this efficiency is achieved, photon-number errors in the SPDC sources are sufficiently low as to guarantee correct boson-sampling most of the time. In this scheme the required detector efficiency must increase exponentially in the photon number. Thus, we show that idealised SPDC sources will not present a bottleneck for future boson-sampling implementations. Rather, photodetection efficiency is the limiting factor and thus future implementations may continue to employ SPDC sources.