Published: May 07, 2024
In daily life, when two objects are “indistinguishable,” it’s due to an imperfect state of knowledge. As a street magician scrambles the cups and balls, you could, in principle, keep track of which ball is which as they are passed between the cups. However, at the smallest scales in nature, even the magician cannot tell one ball from another. True indistinguishability of this type can fundamentally alter how the balls behave. For example, in a classic experiment by Hong, Ou, and Mandel, two identical photons (balls) striking opposite sides of a half-reflective mirror are always found to exit from the same side of the mirror (in the same cup). This results from a special kind of interference, not any interaction between the photons. With more photons, and more mirrors, this interference becomes enormously complicated.
Measuring the pattern of photons that emerges from a given maze of mirrors is known as “boson sampling.” Boson sampling is believed to be infeasible to simulate on a classical computer for more than a few tens of photons. As a result, there has been a significant effort to perform such experiments with actual photons and demonstrate that a quantum device is performing a specific computational task that cannot be performed classically. This effort has culminated in recent claims of quantum advantage using photons.
Now, in a recently published Nature paper, JILA Fellow and NIST Physicist and University of Colorado Boulder Physics Professor Adam Kaufman and his team, along with collaborators at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology), have demonstrated a novel method of boson sampling using ultracold atoms (specifically, bosonic atoms) in a two-dimensional optical lattice of intersecting laser beams.
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