Prime Candidate
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University researchers are among an international team to have made the first-ever execution of a quantum calculation, a major step towards building the first quantum computers.
Professor Andrew White, from the University’s Centre for Quantum Computer Technology, together with colleagues from the University of Toronto in Canada, said by manipulating quantum mechanically entangled photons – the fundamental particles of light – the prime factors of the number 15 were calculated.
“Prime numbers are divisible only by themselves and one, so the prime factors of 15 are three and five,” Professor White said.
“Although the answer to this problem could have been obtained much more quickly by querying a bright eight-year-old, as the number becomes bigger and bigger, the problem becomes more and more difficult.
“What is difficult for your brain is also difficult for conventional computers. This is not just a problem of interest to pure mathematicians: the computational difficulty of factoring very large numbers forms the basis of widely used internet encryption systems.”
Ben Lanyon, a University doctoral student and the research paper’s first author, said calculating the prime factors of 15 was a crucial step towards calculating much larger numbers, which could be used to crack cryptographic codes that were unbreakable using conventional computers.
The research was published in the prestigious Physical Review Letters late last year.
