Exercise Sheet 9

Quantum Information - Summer Semester 2020

RWTH Aachen
Valentin Bruch, Fernando Martinez, Pedro Parrado
Due: 15 June 2020, 12.00

Problem 1 Entanglement swapping. (3, 3, 4)

Consider Alice and Bob, each of them holding initially two qubits in a Bell state |Φ+ i = √1 (|00i+
2
|11i), as shown in the left part of the figure.
Now, both Alice and Bob send one of the qubits of their respective Bell pairs to a device, which
realises a Bell-state measurement (BSM) on qubits 2 and 3, according to the circuit shown in
the dashed box of the figure.

(a) Determine the state |ψ1 i before the measurements M2 and M3 in the computational (Z)
basis.
(b) Obtain the set of unitaries U that Alice should apply (depending on the measurement
results M2 , M3 ) on her remaining qubit to establish a Bell pair |Φ+ i1,4 shared with Bob.
(c) Consider the system again in state |ψ1 i, as determined in part (ii). Now, qubit 2 is
measured in the X-basis, rather than the Z-basis, whereas qubit 3 is still measured in the
Z-basis. Explain whether the resulting state |ψ2 i of qubits 1 and 4 can be an entangled
state.

Problem 2 Shor algorithm (2, 4, 4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2)

In this problem, you will try to factorize N = 15 using Shor’s algorithm on paper.
(a) First, pick a random integer, say x = 7. Calculate the greatest common divisor gcd(N, x).
What is the condition to proceed or stop at this stage? Give the reasons.
(b) At the second step, you use the help of a quantum computer and the quantum order
finding algorithm to determine the unknown order r, where r is the smallest integer such
that xr = 1 mod N . Choose the number t of qubits in the first register such that an error
probability of at most  = 1/4 for the algorithm is ensured (see also lecture notes).

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Exercise sheet 9 Quantum Information SS2020 15 June 2020, 12.00

(c) For the first register with all qubits prepared in |0i, and the second register initialised
in state |y = 1i, apply Hadamard gates on all qubits of the first register, followed by the
application of the unitary transformation U , acting on the two registers as

U : |ji |yi 7→ |ji xj y mod N .

 

Determine the resulting state |ψ1 i, and write explicitly the first 10 terms. (You can work
with t = 11 here and in the following.)
(d) Now, apply the inverse Fourier transform to the first register, to obtain the state |ψ2 i =
(F T † ⊗ 1) |ψ1 i.
For convenience, write the coefficients using the notation involving ωN , where ωN = e2πi/N
and N = 2t .
(e) Now the qubits of the first register are measured in the computational basis. What is
the probability to obtain an arbitrary outcome l ∈ {0, . . . , 2t − 1}? Optional: Plot this
probability distribution as a histogram, using Mathematica or a similar program.
(f ) Suppose the measurement outcome happens to be l = 1536. Use the continued fraction
algorithm to try to find the order r of x = 7 mod 15.
(g) Since r is even, (xr/2 − 1)(xr/2 + 1) = 0 mod N . From this point, explain the condition
to be checked, to decide whether to proceed or pick a random x again and redo everything
from step 1.
(h) Conclude by obtaining the two prime factors of N . How are these obtained? Then exit
the Shor algorithm.
(Note that parts (f) to (h) can be solved independently of the previous parts.)