Boson sampling with random numbers of photons

Abstract: Multiphoton interference is at the very heart of quantum foundations and applications in quantum sensing and information processing. In particular, boson sampling experiments have the potential to demonstrate quantum computational supremacy while only relying on multiphoton interference in linear optical interferometers. However, even when photonic losses are negligible, scalable experiments are challenged by the rapid decrease of the probability of success of current schemes with probabilistic sources for a large number of single photons in each experimental sample. Remarkably, we show a novel boson sampling scheme where the probability of success increases instead of decreasing with the number of input photons eventually approaching a unit value even with non deterministic sources. This is achieved by sampling at the same time in the number of occupied input ports and the number of input photons per port, differently form previous schemes where the number of occupied ports is fixed at each experimental run. Therefore, these results provide a new exciting route toward future demonstrations of quantum computational supremacy with scalable experimental resources.