Experimental study of Shor's factoring algorithm using the IBM Q Experience
AI Breakdown
Get a structured breakdown of this paper — what it's about, the core idea, and key takeaways for the field.
Abstract
We study the results of a compiled version of Shor's factoring algorithm on the ibmqx5 superconducting chip, for the particular case of $N=15$, $21$ and $35$. The semi-classical quantum Fourier transform is used to implement the algorithm with only a small number of physical qubits and the circuits are designed to reduce the number of gates to the minimum. We use the square of the statistical overlap to give a quantitative measure of the similarity between the experimentally obtained distribution of phases and the predicted theoretical distribution one for different values of the period. This allows us to assign a period to the experimental data without the use of the continued fraction algorithm. A quantitative estimate of the error in our assignment of the period is then given by the overlap coefficient.