Benchmarking the ORCA PT-2 Boson Sampler using Minimum Dominating Set Problems

2026-05-29

AI Summary

This work presents the first end-to-end benchmarking of boson sampling for solving the minimum dominating set problem on real photonic hardware—specifically, the ORCA PT-2 time-bin interferometer. By embedding boson sampling within the gradient-free variational algorithm Binary Bosonic Solver and comparing its performance against classical exact and heuristic solvers, the study systematically evaluates solution quality and runtime. Experimental results demonstrate that classical algorithms currently outperform the photonic approach under existing hardware constraints. However, simulation-based analysis indicates that as interferometer scale increases and optical losses decrease, boson sampling could eventually achieve quantum advantage for this combinatorial optimization task. This research provides an empirical foundation and scalability projection for quantum photonic approaches to hard optimization problems.

Abstract

We use boson sampling as part of a gradient-free variational algorithm (the Binary Bosonic Solver) to solve a minimum dominating set problem and compare these results to a number of exact and heuristic classical algorithms. The boson sampling has been performed on the physical PT-2 time-bin interferometer from ORCA Computing. The PT-2 device has been tested here using both a single- and double-loop configuration and the results are compared based on the best found solution and the overall run time. With the parameters used in this experiment, the boson sampler is outperformed by the classical methods, but we hypothesise that this is due to insufficient samples and iterations. We classically simulate boson sampling in a single-loop configuration to break down the runtime for individual algorithmic components, allowing for estimates of when boson sampling may outperform classical methods. This study recommends a watching brief on boson sampling as the complexity of the interferometer is improved and the loss in the hardware is reduced allowing for better performance from the associated algorithms.

Problem

• boson sampling
• minimum dominating set
• quantum benchmarking
• variational algorithm
• classical comparison

Innovation

• boson sampling
• variational quantum algorithm
• minimum dominating set
• photonic interferometer
• quantum-classical benchmarking