A novel experiment supports quantum computation using photonic circuits to greatly increase quantum device speed.

We present a table-top quantum estimation protocol to measure the gravitational acceleration g by using an optomechanical cavity. In particular, we exploit the nonlinear quantum light-matter interaction between an optical field and a massive mirror acting as mechanical oscillator. The gravitational field influences the system dynamics affecting the phase of the cavity field during the interaction. Reading out such a phase carried by the radiation leaking from the cavity, we provide an estimate of the gravitational acceleration through interference measurements. Contrary to previous studies, having adopted a fully quantum description, we are able to propose a quantum analysis proving the ultimate bound to the estimability of the gravitational acceleration and verifying optimality of homodyne detection. Noticeably, thanks to the light-matter decoupling at the measurement time, no initial cooling of the mechanical oscillator is demanded in principle

Boson sampling represents a promising approach to obtain evidence of the supremacy of quantum systems as a resource for the solution of computational problems. The classical hardness of Boson Sampling has been related to the so called Permanent-of-Gaussians Conjecture and has been extended to some generalizations such as Scattershot Boson Sampling, approximate and lossy sampling under some reasonable constraints. However, it is still unclear how demanding these techniques are for a quantum experimental sampler. Starting from a state of the art analysis and taking account of the foreseeable practical limitations, we evaluate and discuss the bound for quantum supremacy for different recently proposed approaches, accordingly to today's best known classical simulators.

The control of quantum systems requires the ability to change and read-out the phase of a system. The non-commutativity of canonical conjugate operators can induce phases on quantum systems, which can be employed for implementing phase gates and for precision measurements. Here we study the phase acquired by a radiation field after its radiation pressure interaction with a mechanical oscillator, and compare the classical and quantum contributions. The classical description can reproduce the nonlinearity induced by the mechanical oscillator and the loss of correlations between mechanics and optical field at certain interaction times. Such features alone are therefore insufficient for probing the quantum nature of the interaction. Our results thus isolate genuine quantum contributions of the optomechanical interaction that could be probed in current experiments. arXiv:1604.05679v2 [quant-ph]

We present a way of measuring with high precision the anharmonicity of a quantum oscillator coupled to an optical field via radiation pressure. Our protocol uses a sequence of pulsed interactions to perform a loop in the phase space of the mechanical oscillator, which is prepared in a thermal state. We show how the optical field acquires a phase depending on the anharmonicity. Remarkably, one only needs small initial cooling of the mechanical motion to probe even small anharmonicities. Finally, by applying tools from quantum estimation theory, we calculate the ultimate bound on the estimation precision posed by quantum mechanics and compare it with the precision obtainable with feasible measurements such as homodyne and heterodyne detection on the cavity field. In particular we demonstrate that homodyne detection is nearly optimal in the limit of a large number of photons of the field and we discuss the estimation precision of small anharmonicities in terms of its signal-to-noise ratio.