Summer school 'A first introduction to quantum computing'

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While the theory of quantum computing has been around for decades by now, only recent years have seen an increase in the amount of available quantum computers. As of today, these quantum computers are way too small to be used in real applications, but recent evolution of available qubits – the quantum equivalent to classical bits – indicate that a ready-to-use quantum computing machine could be developed in the foreseeable future. Already now, the concept of quantum-safety plays an important role in industry, as the advent of quantum computers will render many important encryption algorithms – most prominently the RSA algorithm – insecure, as Shor’s algorithm can compute prime factors of large numbers efficiently on quantum machines. 

Quantum computing differs from classical computing in several key aspects. A “bit”, the smallest piece of information in classical computing, can either have one of the states zero or one. On the…