• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevA.98.062314
• Corpus ID: 119227039

Simulating arbitrary Gaussian circuits with linear optics

@article{Chakhmakhchyan2018SimulatingAG,
  title={Simulating arbitrary Gaussian circuits with linear optics},
  author={Levon Chakhmakhchyan and Nicolas J. Cerf},
  journal={Physical Review A},
  year={2018}
}

• L. Chakhmakhchyan, N. Cerf
• Published 30 March 2018
• Physics
• Physical Review A

Linear canonical transformations of bosonic modes correspond to Gaussian unitaries, which comprise passive linear-optical transformations as effected by a multiport passive interferometer and active Bogoliubov transformations as effected by a nonlinear amplification medium. As a consequence of the Bloch-Messiah theorem, any Gaussian unitary can be decomposed into a passive interferometer followed by a layer of single-mode squeezers and another passive interferometer. Here, it is shown how to circumvent the need for active transformations. Namely, we provide a technique to simulate sampling from the joint input and output distributions of any Gaussian circuit with passive interferometry only, provided two-mode squeezed vacuum states are available as a prior resource. At the heart of the procedure, we exploit the fact that a beam splitter under partial time reversal simulates a two-mode squeezer, which gives access to an arbitrary Gaussian circuit without any nonlinear optical medium. This yields, in particular, a procedure for simulating with linear optics an extended boson sampling experiment, where photons jointly propagate through an arbitrary multimode Gaussian circuit, followed by the detection of output photon patterns.