QUANTUM SIMULATION USING EXCITON-POLARITONS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS TOWARD ACCELERATED OPTIMIZATION PROBLEM SEARCH

Exciton-polaritons in semiconductor microcavities have been recently observed to undergo dynamical Bose-Einstein condensation. This opens the door for many of the analogous experiments to be performed on a semiconductor chip that have been performed in atomic systems. One of the future applications of quantum technology is quantum simulation, where quantum many body problems are directly simulated in the laboratory. Recent advances towards the realization of quantum simulators using exciton-polaritons will be reviewed. In particular, we discuss in detail one application of the ideas of quantum simulation, where Bose-Einstein condensates are used to accelerate the speed of finding the ground state of a given optimization problem. The method uses the principle of indistinguishability, in contrast to the principle of superposition which is traditionally used to obtain a quantum speedup. By taking advantage of bosonic final state stimulation, the convergence to the ground state can be accelerated by a factor of N, where N is the number of bosons in the BEC.