Genuine non-Gaussian entanglement: quantum correlations beyond Hong-Ou-Mandel

Hong-Ou-Mandel effect is an important demonstration of particle indistinguishability, when identical single photons interfere at a beamsplitter to generate the two-photon entangled NOON state. On the other hand, NOON states with N ≥ 3 photons have long been conjectured beyond the deterministic generation of photon interference. To characterize the separation, we introduce the notion of genuine non-Gaussian entanglement (NGE), which cannot be generated via a generalized Hong-Ou-Mandel experiment, with Gaussian protocols extending the beamsplitter and separable input states replacing the single photons. We establish a resource theory to characterize such quantum correlations beyond Hong-Ou-Mandel and prove that NOON states with N ≥ 3 are indeed among the NGE class. With the generalized Hong-Ou-Mandel protocol as free operations, we introduce two monotones to characterize genuine non-Gaussian entanglement: one derived from the entanglement entropy and the other from the minimal extension size required to convert a state into a free state. Finally, we demonstrate that the tomography process of pure free states can be performed efficiently, while all learning protocols of states with genuine non-Gaussian entanglement require exponential overheads connected to the monotone. This implies that states generated in Boson sampling are efficiently learnable despite its measurement statistics being hard to sample from. We conduct a numerical experiment for the tomography process and demonstrated the separation in the convergence rate of error.