USTC's Jiuzhang 4.0 photonic processor reports 3050-photon Gaussian boson sampling, a renewed quantum-advantage scale claim
An arXiv preprint (2508.09092, submitted 2025-08-12) from a USTC-affiliated team (first author Hua-Liang Liu; the Jiuzhang programme) reports up to 3050 detected photons in programmable Gaussian boson sampling on the Jiuzhang 4.0 photonic processor, stating that the largest instances would require more than 10^42 years to simulate classically versus a 25.6-microsecond runtime on the device. The photon-number scale substantially exceeds the prior Jiuzhang generations.
Boson-sampling scale is an explicit section 7.3(b) named metric and a section 8 score-6 anchor for when a research result becomes investor-relevant. A 3050-photon programmable Gaussian-boson-sampling demonstration is a large jump in the scale of a quantum-advantage experiment from a tracked national-lab programme, and the >10^42-year classical-hardness estimate is the standard advantage framing. Logged as a benchmark; the advantage claim is, as with prior boson-sampling milestones, contingent on the strength of the best classical spoofing algorithms.
Continued scaling of the Jiuzhang line keeps USTC at the frontier of sampling-based quantum-advantage demonstrations, though Gaussian boson sampling remains a non-universal, application-narrow platform; the commercial bearing is indirect national-capability signaling rather than a path to fault-tolerant computing.