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Science

Implementation of the Semiclassical Quantum Fourier Transform in a Scalable System

John Chiaverini, J. Britton, Dietrich G. Leibfried, Emanuel H. Knill, M. D. Barrett, R. B. Blakestad, Wayne M. Itano, John D. Jost, C. Langer, Roee Ozeri, Tobias Schaetz, David J. Wineland

Published May 12, 2005• 154 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report the implementation of the semiclassical quantum Fourier transform in a system of three beryllium ion qubits (two-level quantum systems) confined in a segmented multizone trap. The quantum Fourier transform is the crucial final step in Shor's algorithm, and it acts on a register of qubits to determine the periodicity of the quantum state's amplitudes. Because only probability amplitudes are required for this task, a more efficient semiclassical version can be used, for which only single-qubit operations conditioned on measurement outcomes are required. We apply the transform to several input states of different periodicities; the results enable the location of peaks corresponding to the original periods. This demonstration incorporates the key elements of a scalable ion-trap architecture, suggesting the future capability of applying the quantum Fourier transform to a large number of qubits as required for a useful quantum factoring algorithm.

DOI
10.1126/science.1110335

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We report the implementation of the semiclassical quantum Fourier transform in a system of three beryllium ion qubits (two-level quantum systems) confined in a segmented multizone trap. The quantum Fourier transform is the crucial final step in Shor's algorithm, and it acts on a register of qubits to determine the periodicity of the quantum state's amplitudes. Because only probability amplitudes are required for this task, a more efficient semiclassical version can be used, for which only single-qubit operations conditioned on measurement outcomes are required. We apply the transform to several input states of different periodicities; the results enable the location of peaks corresponding to the original periods. This demonstration incorporates the key elements of a scalable ion-trap architecture, suggesting the future capability of applying the quantum Fourier transform to a large number of qubits as required for a useful quantum factoring algorithm.
Because of the difficulty of building a high-dimensional quantum register, this paper presents an implementation of the high-dimensional quantum Fourier transform (QFT) based on a low-dimensional quantum register. First, we define the t-bit semiclassical quantum Fourier transform. In terms of probability amplitude, we prove that the transform can realize quantum Fourier transformation, illustrate that the requirement for the two-qubit gate reduces obviously, and further design a quantum circuit of the transform. Combining the classical fixed-window method and the implementation of Shor’s quantum factorization algorithm, we then redesign a circuit for Shor’s algorithm, whose required computation resource is approximately equal to that of Parker’s. The requirement for elementary quantum gates for Parker’s algorithm is O(⌈ log N⌉3, and the quantum register for our circuit requires t−1 more dimensions than Parker’s. However, our circuit is t 2 times as fast as Parker’s, where t is the width of the window.
A quantum Fourier transform (QFT) has been implemented on a three qubit nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) quantum computer to extract the periodicity of an input state. Implementation of a QFT provides a first step towards the realization of Shor's factoring and other quantum algorithms. The experimental implementation of the QFT on a periodic state is presented along with a quantitative measure of its efficiency measured through state tomography. Experimentally realizing the QFT is a clear demonstration of the ability of NMR to control quantum systems.
Quantum computers can solve certain problems more efficiently compared to conventional classical methods. In the endeavor to build a quantum computer, several competing platforms have emerged that can implement certain quantum algorithms using a few qubits. However, the demonstrations so far have been done usually by tailoring the hardware to meet the requirements of a particular algorithm implemented for a limited number of instances. Although such proof of principal implementations are important to verify the working of algorithms on a physical system, they further need to have the potential to serve as a general purpose quantum computer allowing the flexibility required for running multiple algorithms and be scaled up to host more qubits. Here we demonstrate a small programmable quantum computer based on five trapped atomic ions each of which serves as a qubit. By optically resolving each ion we can individually address them in order to perform a complete set of single-qubit and fully connected two-qubit quantum gates and alsoperform efficient individual qubit measurements. We implement a computation architecture that accepts an algorithm from a user interface in the form of a standard logic gate sequence and decomposes it into fundamental quantum operations that are native to the hardware using a set of compilation instructions that are defined within the software. These operations are then effected through a pattern of laser pulses that perform coherent rotations on targeted qubits in the chain. The architecture implemented in the experiment therefore gives us unprecedented flexibility in the programming of any quantum algorithm while staying blind to the underlying hardware. As a demonstration we implement the Deutsch-Jozsa and Bernstein-Vazirani algorithms on the five-qubit processor and achieve average success rates of 95 and 90 percent, respectively. We also implement a five-qubit coherent quantum Fourier transform and examine its performance in the period finding and phase estimation protocol. We find fidelities of 84 and 62 percent, respectively. While maintaining the same computation architecture the system can be scaled to more ions using resources that scale favorably (O(N^2)) with the number of qubits N.
To overcome the difficulty of realizing large-scale quantum Fourier transform (QFT) within existing technology, this paper presents a resource-saving method, namely t-bit semiclassical QFT over (Z_(2^n)), which could realize large-scale QFT using arbitrary-scale quantum register. Using our method, the scale of quantum register can be determined flexibility according to the scale of quantum system, enabling the quantum resource and speed of realizing QFT to be optimal. By developing a feasible method to realize the control quantum gate R_k, we experimentally demonstrate the 2-bit semiclassical QFT over (Z_(2^3)) on IBM's quantum cloud computer, showing the feasibility of our proposed method. Then, we compare the actual performance of 2-bit semiclassical QFT and standard QFT in the experiments. Experimental data show that the fidelity of the result of 2-bit semiclassical QFT is higher than that of standard QFT, which is mainly due to less two-qubit controlled gates are required in the semiclassical QFT. Furthermore, based on the proposed method, we successfully implement the Shor's algorithm to factorize N=15.
An algorithm for the generation of shuttling sequences is necessary for the operation of a linear segmented ion-trap quantum computer. The present work provides an implementation of an algorithm that produces sequences proved to be optimal for circuits with a quantum Fourier transform-like structure. Such optimality was proved in previous work of our group. We first present an approach for qubit mapping, i.e. determining the initial ordering of the ions, termed the common ion order, and develop a heuristic algorithm for its implementation. We explain how this heuristic is integrated in the shuttling sequence generation algorithm described in the previous work. The results show the increased performance of the heuristic in terms of reducing the number of required shuttling operations. The number of ion displacements required exhibits a polynomial increase in terms of the number of qubits, such that these operations become the main contribution to the overall resource cost. Furthermore, we show that multiple zones for gate interactions can reduce the amount of qubit register reordering.