Overview of applications of photonics in quantum computing

The Gaussian Boson Sampling experiment, originally proposed by Aaronson and Arkhipov, was designed to demonstrate the power of quantum computing using a relatively simple setup. The experiment has been recently carried out by Zhong et al. (2020) and Madsen et al. (2022). In a long-term perspective, these can be viewed as first steps towards building a fault-tolerant quantum computer based on photonics, as an alternative to the superconducting qubits technology. We take a brief look at two commercial efforts at building such a machine (PsiQuantum, Xanadu).