Hardware requirements for realizing a quantum advantage with deterministic single-photon sources

Abstract

Boson sampling is a specialised algorithm native to the quantum photonic platform developed for near-term demonstrations of quantum advantage over classical computers. While clear useful applications for such near-term pre-fault-tolerance devices are not currently known, reaching a quantum advantage regime serves as a useful benchmark for the hardware. Here, we analyse and detail hardware requirements needed to reach quantum advantage with deterministic quantum emitters, a promising platform for photonic quantum computing. We elucidate key steps that can be taken in experiments to overcome practical constraints and establish quantitative hardware-level requirements. We find that quantum advantage is within reach using quantum emitters with an efficiency of 60%-70% and interferometers constructed according to a hybrid-mode-encoding architecture, constituted of Mach-Zehnder interferometers with an insertion loss of 0.0035 (a transmittance of 99.92%) per component.