A hybrid scheme for prime factorization and its experimental implementation using IBM quantum processor

TL;DR

This paper presents a hybrid quantum-classical approach for prime factorization of bi-prime numbers, implemented experimentally on IBM's quantum processor, combining classical optimization with adiabatic quantum techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a general hybrid factorization scheme adaptable to any quantum architecture, demonstrated through experimental factorization of 35 on IBM's quantum processor.

Findings

Successfully factorized 35 using IBM's quantum processor

Demonstrated the feasibility of a hybrid quantum-classical factorization scheme

Extended previous hybrid schemes to be more general and architecture-independent

Abstract

We report a quantum-classical hybrid scheme for factorization of bi-prime numbers (which are odd and square-free) using IBM's quantum processors. The hybrid scheme proposed here involves both classical optimization techniques and adiabatic quantum optimization techniques, and is build by extending a previous scheme of hybrid factorization [Pal et al., Pramana 92, 26 (2019) and Xu et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 130501 (2012)]. The quantum part of the scheme is very general in the sense that it can be implemented using any quantum computing architecture. Here, as an example, we experimentally implement our scheme for prime factorization using IBM's QX4 quantum processor and have factorised 35.