t b a b a

In a key development for Topological quantum computers, in 2005 Vladimir J. Gold-
man, Fernando E. Camino and Wei Zhou claimed to have direct experimental confir-
mation that quasiparticles occurring in the fractional quantum Hall state are anyons,
a crucial first step in the implementation of a Topological quantum computer.
What is the “winning” technology going to be? Nobody can give the answer up to date.
Even though we have lived with quantum mechanics for a century, our studies of quantum
effects in complex artificial systems as the systems for quantum computing presented above
are still in its infancy. The ideas of quantum information theory will stimulate more and
more creative and exciting developments of complex quantum systems for the coming future.
2.5 Quantum Algorithms
By the early nineties it was known that a quantum computer may be faster than any clas-
sical computer for certain problems. Nonetheless these observations were largely driven by
academic curiosity. There was not much motivation for people to spend lots of money or
time trying to build a quantum computer.
This situation changed when Peter Shor devised a polynomial time algorithm for factoring
large numbers on a quantum computer in 1994. This discovery drew great attention to the
field of quantum computing because of the intrinsic intellectual beauty of the algorithm and
the fact that efficient integer factorization is a very important practical problem.
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