Rati Avaliani

Senior Project: Quantum Computing

Advisor: Ilia Mestvirishvili

Quantum+ Computer = New Era

Both words quantum and computer were topics of my genuine interest for last years, so
when I read them written together in an article my curiosity pushed me towards deeper
investigation of this ephemeral and perplexing topic. In my project I will try to not only provide
general arguments supporting importance and incredible variety of different applications of
quantum computer, but also try to explain fundamental concepts of this very interesting but also
challenging topic.
Faster speed and the capacity to solve hitherto unsolvable problems are the twin
motivations driving research on the building of quantum computers. The use of information
theory in quantum systems goes back more than thirty years. It had two objectives:
characterization of information in a quantum system, and using a quantum system to simulate a
useful computation. Current approaches to quantum computation exploit the phenomena of
entanglement and superposition to create a paradigm that is more powerful than that of classical
computing. The field has grown from the exotic arena confined to a few theoretical physicists
into a full scale theoretical and experimental research area with millions of dollars being spent to
build prototypes of quantum computers. Many believe that these computers are the only way that
one can transcend the eventual limitations of Moores law, according to which, the advancements

in technology and computers will slow down and eventually stop, because there is no way to
make transistors, the main part of computers, infinitely small.
Quantum computers are completely new and entirely different kind of computer.
Quantum mechanics is all about the behavior of the most basic parts of our world, the
fundamental elementary particles that make up the universe. These elementary particles do not
act in the same way the world around us does; they have totally different properties. Sometimes
these particles can react in totally unpredictable ways, even popping in and out of existence. If
we take these properties out of the Quantum world and enlarge them to work in our classical
world, we can take advantage of them. Conventional computers work through transistors. A
transistor can be in two different states, on or off, 1 or 0; these numbers are known as Binary
Digits, or bits. These transistors react from input, the output goes to logic gates where the final
result is outputted and you see whats on your screen. Quantum computers work by taking the
properties of Quantum mechanics and applying them to computers. Instead of using a transistor
to compute data, Quantum computers use Quantum objects as a special kind of transistor known
as a Quantum Binary Digit, or qubit. The Quantum object use can be a number of different
fundamental particles. The only requirement is that the Quantum object behaves according to the
laws of Quantum mechanics. This is the reason why Quantum computers are so different from
classical computers. It computes using the special and strange properties of the Quantum world.
The first strange property of the Quantum world is superposition. Superposition is a very odd
Quantum phenomenon, in which an object is in more than one state at a time. If you flip the coin
there are two possible outcomes, heads or tails. Before the coin lands we dont know if its going
to be one or another, so, simply, in the Quantum world it would be both. Once it lands and we
observe it, it would be one or the other, but before it lands it is in multiple states, it is in

superposition. Quantum objects behave in almost the same way as the flipped coin. One of the
fundamental particles that can be used as a qubit is an electron. One of the properties of an
electron is its spin. In fact, it is not really spinning but describes its rotation along the magnetic
field. Think of an electron like a compass needle. The compass will always point to the north, but
if you were to turn it exactly 180 degrees it would stay like that. Electrons behave in a similar
way. They always point in the direction of their magnetic field. This is their sitting position, or
spin down. But, if you were to turn it exactly 180 degree, just like a compass needle, it would
have a spin up. This property can be used as a qubit, because by this property an electron can be
in a superposition. The difference between coins compasses and electrons is that coins and
compasses are not Quantum objects, and they dont behave in a true Quantum way. The real
Quantum objects change as we observe them and the outcome changes because they are forced
to make a decision. Before you measure an electron in a superposition, it has not yet decided
whether its spin up or spin down. It has certain percentage of being both, but because we cannot
measure something thats in a superposition, we will not know what that percentage is. Its like if
you had a coin, flat on a table and when you look at it, it decided whether its heads or tails. The
real purpose of Quantum computers comes in the increase in computing power. With one regular
bit we have two possible states, 0 or 1. When we have two regular bits, we have four possible
states: 00, 01, 10, and 11. The computer only outputs one of these variants. When we have two
qubits, there are same possible states, but with superposition each qubit can be a combination of
both 1 and 0 states. This causes Quantum computers to be much more powerful than classical
ones. This means, when we have two bits, a classical computer will output two bits of
information. When we have two qubits, because they can simultaneously be in 1 and 0 states,
they will contain four bits of information. Therefore, when more qubits are added, the Quantum

computer will output 2 to the power of the number of qubits bits of information. Because the
power is exponential, even the simplest of the Quantum computers can be more powerful that
our current computers. While qubits can compute data in multiple states at once, only one of
those states can be observed. This means, that a Quantum computer can compute many different
things at once, but can output only one of those. So the computer will choose the best variant to
output. What superposition allows us to do is have a qubit in multiple states at once. Lets say
you are doing a computation of kicking a ball into the net and the only variable is the balls Y
position and it can be from 0 centimeters to 100 centimeters. With a regular computer, you would
have to do one computation at zero centimeters, then another on one centimeter and so on, one at
a time. You would have to try the computation with every possible position the ball could be in.
With the Quantum computer, the qubits could exist in every position from zero to one hundred.
And then, once the Quantum computer finds the position from where it would make it into the
net, it would output the position of the ball. Quantum computers can have qubits that exist in
every possible state and then they can output the best answer. Superposition is one of the many
strange properties of the Quantum mechanics. One that is more bizarre than superposition is the
Quantum entanglement. Entanglement is a property where two particles behave exactly the
opposite. If two particles are entangled and one has changed in some way, the other would react
in the exact opposite way. This action is done instantly, faster than anything else in the world,
even light. It gets even more amazing when we take into consideration the distance the entangled
particles could be in. The two entangled particles could be in the opposite end of the universe
and still become opposite instantly. This property of Quantum mechanics is so strange that Albert
Einstein described it as a spooky motion at a distance, because he could not figure out how it
worked and even denied its very existence. It is in fact spooky. Objects from our everyday lives

dont act that way. An apple does not flip upside down because it does not want to be like
another apple, which is upright. Entanglement can be thought of as two coins, both in
superposition. If the two coins are spinning and the first one lands on heads, we would instantly
know that the second one is going to be tails, even without looking at it. The problem with
Quantum computer lies in engineering one. Quantum computing is all about taking the
microscopic world and making it to control our macroscopic world. The microscopic world is
very finicky; it is hard to control and almost impossible to predict. But if we can harness the
power of the Quantum world, Quantum computers will truly change the future allowing us to do
things that would never be possible with classical computers. The strange properties used in
these special computers will open up a whole new world of computing.
All the problems in the world could be divided in two main groups: P and NP. P and NP
are the abbreviations for polynomial and non-polynomial respectively, and those stand for the
functions of time needed to solve particular problems. If a problem is polynomial, no matter how
hard it seems to be solved, todays modern computers will be able to solve it, even if it takes
some time. But, if a problem is non-polynomial, i.e. the graph of its time to be solved is
exponential, even the supercomputer cannot solve it. In computer science, big O notation is used
to classify algorithms by how they respond (e.g., in their processing time or working space

requirements) to changes in input size.

Polynomial type problems are ones which are easy to solve and check whether the answer is
correct or not. On the other hand, non-polynomial type problems are ones which are futile to try
to solve, but provided an answer it is possible to check whether its true or not. Suppose that you
are organizing housing accommodations for a group of four hundred university students. Space is
limited and only one hundred of the students will receive places in the dormitory. To complicate

matters, the Dean has provided you with a list of pairs of incompatible students, and requested
that no pair from this list appear in your final choice. This is an example of what computer
scientists call an NP-problem, since it is easy to check if a given choice of one hundred students
proposed by a coworker is satisfactory (i.e., no pair taken from your coworker's list also appears
on the list from the Dean's office), however the task of generating such a list from scratch seems
to be so hard as to be completely impractical. Indeed, the total number of ways of choosing one
hundred students from the four hundred applicants is greater than the number of atoms in the
known universe! Thus no future civilization could ever hope to build a supercomputer capable of
solving the problem by brute force; that is, by checking every possible combination of 100
students. Another easy example of such NP problems is when building a house and you have a
list of things you want to have in your house, but you cannot afford everything on your list
because you are constrained by a budget. What you really want to work out is the combination of
items which gives you the best value for your money. Again, this is a very hard problem to solve
because of the huge number of possible combinations. With just two hundred and seventy on/off
switches, there are more possible combinations than atoms in the universe and modern
supercomputers have to try every possible solution to find the best one, thus it would take
infinitely large time for a computer to solve this kind of problems. One of the biggest NP
problems for which we don't yet know an efficient algorithm is factoring integers. One of the
most basic facts in number theory is that any number can be broken down into a unique product
of prime numbers: numbers that are not divisible by any number other than themselves and one.
For small numbers, finding factorizations is easy: 15 is 5 3; 12 is 2 2 3; 70 is 2 5 7. For
larger numbers, however, finding those prime factors can be much more difficult. To see why,
consider the most naive possible way to go about factoring a number: Take every number

between 2 and one less than the number, and divide the number we're interested in by the smaller
number. If this division has no fractional part, or leaves no remainder, then the smaller number is
a factor of our number. This naive brute-force approach works fine for small numbers, but
quickly breaks down as we add more digits. For a two-digit number, we have fewer than a
hundred possible candidate factors. But for a 10-digit number, we have billions of numbers we
need to try out to see if they are factors. So, the number of possible factors increases
exponentially with the number of digits. If we have a number that is the product of two prime
numbers with around 100 digits each, the resulting number will have around 200 digits. Taking
such a huge product and trying to find the two prime numbers going into that number using the
naive brute-force approach would take a nearly unimaginable amount of computing power and
time. The integer-factoring problem is particularly important since almost all security on the
internet depends on this problem not being easily solvable. The RSA encryption algorithm allows
computers to securely communicate with each other over the open internet. A user randomly
chooses two extremely large prime numbers and then multiplies them together. By publishing
that product of the two primes along with another number of the user's choosing, other
computers can encrypt messages for the user that can probably only be decrypted if someone
knows the two prime numbers. As long as the user keeps those prime numbers secret, they will
be the only person who can read messages encrypted with the publicly available product of the
primes. The security of RSA, which is used in many secure online communications, would be
completely broken with an efficient integer-factoring algorithm. A hacker with the ability to take
the public composite number and quickly find the secret prime factors of that number would be
able to decrypt any supposedly secure message sent to the user, such as encrypted emails, or
credit-card numbers sent to an online vendor. Factoring is an NP problem, since a possible

solution can be quickly checked: If I have some prime numbers that I think are the factors of a
given number, I can just multiply those primes together and see if I actually get my number. This
means that if there is an efficient polynomial time algorithm for NP complete problems, large
numbers can be factored quickly, and internet security based on RSA or similar protocols would
fall apart. Fortunately for everyone, this type of algorithm does not exist today and is not
expected to be created in near future. To make the complication with NP problems more general,
they are in fact so hard for even the supercomputers to solve because the number of possible
ways to the answer is nearly infinite and a computer has no other way than trying all the
solutions to find the best one. This is where Quantum Computing comes into play. As already
mentioned above Quantum Computers are much more powerful that ordinary and even
supercomputers that work by transistors, in a way that Quantum Computers can compute many
different things at once, but still only one of those, which is the best, will be outputted. When
dealing with NP problems a Quantum Computer can check possible ways to the answer
simultaneously and then output the best solution in a smallest time imaginable.
Before electricity was explored the development of human society went slowly, but with
this one discovery humanity made one huge step ahead. Peoples lifestyles before and after the
invention of computer are dramatically different. For many, it is hard to imagine something that
will alter modern life so drastically, but, Quantum Computer is one of those. The main research
of worlds best scientists should be directed at this area. First, quantum computing must be
considered a national security issue. Since quantum computers break the codes used ubiquitously
to protect transactions over the Internet, any country obtaining a scalable quantum computer
would have the ability to disrupt electronic communication. At the same time that we pursue the
construction of a quantum computer, we should also put resources into understanding how to

build codes which are not breakable by quantum computers. Second, quantum information
science research will help to maintain scientific and technological advantages. A Quantum
computer, because it could simulate the physics that dominates at atomic and molecular scales,
would give any country that possesses it great strengths in its fundamental sciences and applied
technologies. Quantum computers offer the potential to probe, simulate, and study quantum
systems that are currently inaccessible using the fastest supercomputers. In fact, if one is to gain
traction in understanding many physical systems of great import (such as complex biological
molecules or complex materials), a quantum computer represents the only path known to be able
to efficiently simulate these systems. Finally, quantum computing is the study of the fundamental
limits of computing and, as such, offers the potential to revolutionize our understanding of
computation itself. As technology shrinks to nanoscale levels, quantum effects need to be dealt
with whether we want them or not. Because we now know that information processing at this
quantum level differs significantly from traditional information processing, it is likely that a
whole series of novel quantum devices could be harvested from quantum computing research.
Quantum computers are very subtle and complex machines, and we still have a lot to learn about
them.

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