# Introduction¶

Follow the installation page to get Strawberry Fields up and running, then jump over to the Tutorials to see what you can do.

Users interested in applications of photonic quantum computers should check out the Graphs and networking, Machine learning and Chemistry pages. Those wanting to dig deeper into the design of circuits can head to the Circuits page.

Developers can head to the Development guide to see how they can contribute to Strawberry Fields.

## Understanding quantum photonics¶

The following pages can be used to gain an understanding of photonic quantum computing and as a reference guide when using Strawberry Fields.

### Near-term device¶

The near-term device available for photonic quantum computing has a fixed architecture with controllable gates. This architecture realizes an algorithm known as Gaussian boson sampling (GBS), which can be programmed to solve a range of practical tasks in graphs and networking, machine learning and chemistry.

A GBS device can be programmed to embed any symmetric matrix. Read more for further details on GBS without needing to dive deeper into quantum computing!

### Photonic quantum computers¶

Photonic quantum systems are described by a slightly different model than qubits. The basic elements of a photonic system are qumodes, each of which can be described by a superposition over different numbers of photons. This model leads to a different set of quantum gates and measurements. In the long term, the photonic and qubit-based approaches will be able to run the same set of established quantum algorithms. On the other hand, near-term photonic and qubit systems will excel at their own specific tasks.

Read more to get to grips with the photonic model of quantum computing and see how it contrasts with the qubit model.

### Quantum algorithms¶

Photonic quantum algorithms have been established for a number of protocols, including teleportation, Hamiltonian simulation and quantum neural networks. This section covers the technical details of these quantum algorithms.

Describing a quantum system requires a number of conventions to be fixed, including the value of Planck’s constant $$\hbar$$ (we set $$\hbar=2$$ by default).