Experimental Quantum Computing to Solve Systems of Linear Equations

Understand

Solving linear systems of equations is ubiquitous in all areas of science and engineering.

• With rapidly growing data sets, such a task can be intractable for classical computers, as the best known classical algorithms require a time proportional to the number of variables N.
• A recently proposed quantum algorithm shows that quantum computers could solve linear systems in a time scale of order log(N), giving an exponential speedup over classical computers.
• Here we realize the simplest instance of this algorithm, solving 2*2 linear equations for various input vectors on a quantum computer.