A duality at the heart of Gaussian boson sampling

Abstract: Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) is a near-term quantum computation framework that is believed to be classically intractable, but yet rich of potential applications. In this paper we study the intimate relation between distributions defined over classes of samples from a GBS device with graph matching polynomials. For this purpose, we introduce a new graph polynomial called the displaced GBS polynomial, whose coefficients are the coarse-grained photon-number probabilities of an arbitrary undirected graph $G$ encoded in a GBS device. We report a discovery of a duality between the displaced GBS polynomial of $G$ and the matching polynomial of $G\,\square\,P_2(x)$ - the Cartesian graph product of $G$ with a single weighted edge also known as the prism over $G$. Besides the surprising insight gained into Gaussian boson sampling, it opens the door for the new way of classically simulating the Gaussian boson sampling device. Furthermore, it motivates the recent success of a new type of coarse-grained quantum statistics used to construct feature maps in [Schuld et al. 2019].