Homodyne detection on Xanadu hardware

Photonic Software Strawberry Fields
1

I’m doing some simulations of gaussian systems using Pennylane. As I understand the Xanadu device we have cloud access to is a gaussian boson sampler in which photon counting measurements can be done.
Is there any hardware available for access in which we can use homodyne detection instead for pure gaussian measurement?

Thanks :slight_smile:

2

Hi @kannan_v! Welcome to the forum.

At this time there is no support for homodyne measurements in Xanadu’s HW. I should also point out that the generation of homodyne samples from a Gaussian state can be done efficiently in a classical computer has pointed out here https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.88.097904

Cheers,

Nicolas

2 Likes
3

Hello,

I’m trying to do a hardware simulation to compare with analytical calculations.
Is there a way to directly measure observable X or P from the hardware device? Or in other words, can I generate those values from the fock basis measurements?

Regards,
Kannan

4

Hi @kannan_v — Unfortunately you cannot generate homodyne statistics from photon-number statistics. You can however easily simulate homodyne measurements using any of the simulators.

Nicolas