A light approach to quantum advantage Quantum computational advantage or supremacy is a long-anticipated milestone toward practical quantum computers. Recent work claimed to have reached this point, but subsequent work managed to speed up the classical simulation and pointed toward a sample size–dependent loophole. Quantum computational advantage, rather than being a one-shot experimental proof, will be the result of a long-term competition between quantum devices and classical simulation. Zhong et al. sent 50 indistinguishable single-mode squeezed states into a 100-mode ultralow-loss interferometer and sampled the output using 100 high-efficiency single-photon detectors. By obtaining up to 76-photon coincidence, yielding a state space dimension of about 10 30 , they measured a sampling rate that is about 10 14 -fold faster than using state-of-the-art classical simulation strategies and supercomputers. Science , this issue p. 1460

We report phase-programmable Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) which produces up to 113 photon detection events out of a 144-mode photonic circuit. A new high-brightness and scalable quantum light source is developed, exploring the idea of stimulated emission of squeezed photons, which has simultaneously near-unity purity and efficiency. This GBS is programmable by tuning the phase of the input squeezed states. The obtained samples are efficiently validated by inferring from computationally friendly subsystems, which rules out hypotheses including distinguishable photons and thermal states. We show that our GBS experiment passes a nonclassicality test based on inequality constraints, and we reveal nontrivial genuine high-order correlations in the GBS samples, which are evidence of robustness against possible classical simulation schemes. This photonic quantum computer, Jiuzhang 2.0, yields a Hilbert space dimension up to ∼10 43 , and a sampling rate ∼10 24 faster than using brute-force simulation on classical supercomputers.

We report an experiment to test quantum interference, entanglement and nonlocality using two dissimilar photon sources, the Sun and a semiconductor quantum dot on the Earth, which are separated by ~150 million kilometers. By making the otherwise vastly distinct photons indistinguishable in all degrees of freedom, we observe time-resolved two-photon quantum interference with a raw visibility of 0.796(17), well above the 0.5 classical limit, providing the first evidence of quantum nature of thermal light. Further, using the photons with no common history, we demonstrate post-selected two-photon entanglement with a state fidelity of 0.826(24), and a violation of Bell's inequality by 2.20(6). The experiment can be further extended to a larger scale using photons from distant stars, and open a new route to quantum optics experiments at an astronomical scale.Can any two photons in the Universe, no matter how distantly and independently they originate from, show quantum interference and entanglement? According to quantum theory, when two quantum-mechanically indistinguishable single photons impinge upon a 50/50 beam splitter, they bunch together out of the same output port due to bosonic statistics. The classical picture of electromagnetic fields failed in understanding the interference of two photons from independent sources with a visibility better than 50% 1-4 , which can be explained by quantum interference of the probability amplitudes of the twophoton events 5 . This effect, also known as Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) two-photon interference 6 , poses a strong conceptual challenge to the celebrated statement by Dirac that "Each photon then interferes only with itself. Interference between different photons never occurs" 7 .

No abstract