Inverse design of high-dimensional quantum optical circuits in Nature Physics !

Programmable optical circuits are an important tool in developing quantum technologies such as transceivers for quantum communication and integrated photonic chips for quantum information processing. Maintaining precise control over every individual component becomes challenging at large scales, leading to a reduction in the quality of operations performed. In parallel, minor imperfections in circuit fabrication are amplified in this regime, dramatically inhibiting their performance. Here we use inverse design techniques to embed optical circuits in the higher-dimensional space of a large, ambient mode mixer such as a commercial multimode fibre. This approach allows us to forgo control over each individual circuit element, and retain a high degree of programmability. We use our circuits as quantum gates to manipulate high-dimensional spatial-mode entanglement in up to seven dimensions. Their programmability allows us to turn a multimode fibre into a generalized multioutcome measurement device, allowing us to both transport and certify entanglement within the transmission channel. With the support of numerical simulations, we show that our method is a scalable approach to obtaining high circuit fidelity with a low circuit depth by harnessing the resource of a high-dimensional mode mixer.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-023-02319-6

Highlight in Phys.org

See also Quantum Gates by TensorFlow and Reservoir Computing

Variational quantum algorithm for Gaussian discrete solitons and their boson sampling

In the context of quantum information, highly nonlinear regimes, such as those supporting solitons, are marginally investigated. We miss general methods for quantum solitons, although they can act as entanglement generators or as self-organized quantum processors. We develop a computational approach that uses a neural network as a variational ansatz for quantum solitons in an array of waveguides. By training the resulting phase-space quantum machine learning model, we find different soliton solutions varying the number of particles and interaction strength. We consider Gaussian states that enable measuring the degree of entanglement and sampling the probability distribution of many-particle events. We also determine the probability of generating particle pairs and unveil that soliton bound states emit correlated pairs. These results may have a role in boson sampling with nonlinear systems and in quantum processors for entangled nonlinear waves

https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12379

https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.106.013518

Quantum Machine Learning course on Github

All-Optical Scalable Spatial Coherent Ising Machine

Networks of optical oscillators simulating coupled Ising spins have been recently proposed as a heuristic platform to solve hard optimization problems. These networks, called coherent Ising machines (CIMs), exploit the fact that the collective nonlinear dynamics of coupled oscillators can drive the system close to the global minimum of the classical Ising Hamiltonian, encoded in the coupling matrix of the network. To date, realizations of large-scale CIMs have been demonstrated using hybrid optical-electronic setups, where optical oscillators simulating different spins are subject to electronic feedback mechanisms emulating their mutual interaction. While the optical evolution ensures an ultrafast computation, the electronic coupling represents a bottleneck that causes the computational time to severely depend on the system size. Here, we propose an all-optical scalable CIM with fully programmable coupling. Our setup consists of an optical parametric amplifier with a spatial light modulator (SLM) within the parametric cavity. The spin variables are encoded in the binary phases of the optical wave front of the signal beam at different spatial points, defined by the pixels of the SLM. We first discuss how different coupling topologies can be achieved by different configurations of the SLM, and then benchmark our setup with a numerical simulation that mimics the dynamics of the proposed machine. In our proposal, both the spin dynamics and the coupling are fully performed in parallel, paving the way towards the realization of size-independent ultrafast optical hardware for large-scale computation purposes.

https://journals.aps.org/prapplied/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.16.054022

https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06737