Classical Modelling of a Bosonic Sampler with Photon Collisions

The original formulation of the boson sampling problem assumed that little or no photon collisions occur. However, modern experimental realizations rely on setups where collisions are quite common, i.e., the number of photons M injected into the circuit is close to the number of detectors N. Here we present a classical algorithm that simulates a bosonic sampler: it calculates the probability of a given photon distribution at the interferometer outputs for a given distribution at the inputs. This algorithm is most effective in cases with multiple photon collisions, and in those cases, it outperforms known algorithms.