Innovation and Development

Shor's Algorithm Realized on Optical Quantum Computer

A research team from Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), CAS, has been successful in performing Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm for factorization, on an optical quantum computer. The achievement has received world-wide concern and interest and appears to be the first experimental demonstrations of true (though rudimentary) quantum mechanical computations. The feat made by Prof. Pan Jianwei and his colleagues including Yang Tao and Lu Chaoyang has been reported by the 19 December issue of Physical Review Letters.