Unified boson sampling Bianchi, Luca Marconi, Carlo Ares, Laura Bacco, Davide Sperling, Jan <jats:p>Boson sampling is a key candidate for demonstrating quantum advantage and has already yielded significant advances in quantum simulation, machine learning, and graph theory. In this work, a unification and extension of distinct forms of boson sampling is developed. The devised protocol merges discrete-variable scattershot boson sampling with continuous-variable Gaussian boson sampling. Therefore, it is rendered possible to harness the complexity of more interesting states, such as squeezed photons, in advanced sampling protocols. A generating function formalism is developed for the joint description of multiphoton and multimode light undergoing Gaussian transformations. The resulting analytical tools enable one to explore interfaces of different photonic quantum-information-processing platforms. A numerical simulation of unified sampling is carried out, benchmarking its performance, complexity, and scalability. Entanglement is characterized to exemplify the generation of quantum correlations from the nonlinear interactions of a unified sampler.</jats:p> American Physical Society (APS) 2025 info:eu-repo/semantics/article doc-type:article text http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501 https://ris.uni-paderborn.de/record/63534 Bianchi L, Marconi C, Ares L, Bacco D, Sperling J. Unified boson sampling. <i>Physical Review Research</i>. 2025;7(4). doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/8hy1-m5gg">10.1103/8hy1-m5gg</a> eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1103/8hy1-m5gg info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/issn/2643-1564 info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess