Distributed Shor's algorithm

Abstract

Shor's algorithm is one of the most important quantum algorithm proposed by Peter Shor [Proceedings of the 35th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, 1994, pp. 124--134]. Shor's algorithm can factor a large integer with certain probability and costs polynomial time in the length of the input integer. The key step of Shor's algorithm is the order-finding algorithm. Specifically, given an $L$-bit integer $N$, we first randomly pick an integer $a$ with $gcd(a,N)=1$, the order of $a$ modulo $N$ is the smallest positive integer $r$ such that $a^r\equiv 1 (\bmod N)$. The order-finding algorithm in Shor's algorithm first uses quantum operations to obtain an estimation of $\dfrac{s}{r}$ for some $s\in\{0, 1, \cdots, r-1\}$, then $r$ is obtained by means of classical algorithms. In this paper, we propose a distributed Shor's algorithm. The difference between our distributed algorithm and the traditional order-finding algorithm is that we use two quantum computers separately to estimate partial bits of $\dfrac{s}{r}$ for some $s\in\{0, 1, \cdots, r-1\}$. To ensure their measuring results correspond to the same $\dfrac{s}{r}$, we need employ quantum teleportation. We integrate the measuring results via classical post-processing. After that, we get an estimation of $\dfrac{s}{r}$ with high precision. Compared with the traditional Shor's algorithm that uses multiple controlling qubits, our algorithm reduces nearly $\dfrac{L}{2}$ qubits and reduces the circuit depth of each computer.