Experimental Realization of Shor's quantum factoring algorithm
Abstract
Quantum computers are proven to fundamentally reduce the resources needed to solve certain mathematical problems. Specifically, quantum computers could find the prime factors of an l-digit number N in only polynomial time with increasing l, using Shor's factoring algorithm. In contrast, the same task requires exponentially many steps on classical machines, at least using presently known algorithms. We present the first experimental realization of Shor's algorithm to factor the number N = 15 using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques. The experiment was made possible by the synthesis of a well suited molecule with 7 distinguishable nuclear spin-1/2 atoms, and the introduction of new technqiues to improve the degree of quantum control. We modeled and predicted the effects of decoherence in our quantum system and show that a significant source of errros can be attributed to simple independent spin decoherence.
- Publication:
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APS March Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- March 2002
- Bibcode:
- 2002APS..MART23001S