Open Access

ARTICLE

Effects of T-Factor on Quantum Annealing Algorithms for Integer Factoring Problem

Zhiqi Liu¹, Shihui Zheng¹, Xingyu Yan¹, Ping Pan^1,2, Licheng Wang^1,3,*

1 State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876, China
2 School of Mathematics and Computer Science, Shaanxi University of Technology, Hanzhong, 723000, China
3 School of Cyberspace Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

* Corresponding Author: Licheng Wang. Email:

Journal of Quantum Computing 2023, 5, 41-54. https://doi.org/10.32604/jqc.2023.045572

Received 31 August 2023; Accepted 10 November 2023; Issue published 12 December 2023

Abstract

The hardness of the integer factoring problem (IFP) plays a core role in the security of RSA-like cryptosystems that are widely used today. Besides Shor’s quantum algorithm that can solve IFP within polynomial time, quantum annealing algorithms (QAA) also manifest certain advantages in factoring integers. In experimental aspects, the reported integers that were successfully factored by using the D-wave QAA platform are much larger than those being factored by using Shor-like quantum algorithms. In this paper, we report some interesting observations about the effects of QAA for solving IFP. More specifically, we introduce a metric, called T-factor that measures the density of occupied qubits to some extent when conducting IFP tasks by using D-wave. We find that T-factor has obvious effects on annealing times for IFP: The larger of T-factor, the quicker of annealing speed. The explanation of this phenomenon is also given.

---

Keywords

---