Peter Shor didn’t set out to break the internet. But an algorithm he developed in the mid-1990s threatened to do just that. In a landmark paper, Shor showed how a hypothetical computer that exploited ...

Long before scientists were talking much about it, Robert Redford fans learned about the power of quantum computers. It was 1992. A goofy movie called Sneakers warned about the dangers of computers ...

Nature talks to Peter Shor 25 years after he showed how to make quantum computations feasible — and how they could endanger our data. When physicists first thought up quantum computers in the 1980s, ...

Ling, A. and Pandya, N. (2025) Quantum Computing and Quantum Sensing: A Pedagogical Introduction to Emerging Quantum ...

Here, we implement an iterative version of the order-finding algorithm 10,11 in which the control register contains only a single qubit, which is recycled n times using a sequence of measurement and ...

When the Robert Redford film Sneakers hit theaters in 1992, most moviegoers had never heard of the Internet. They’d have guessed “World Wide Web” was a horror film involving spiders. And nobody knew ...

Peter Shor, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains why he devised an algorithm for a quantum computer that could unravel our online data encryption. Celeste Biever ...

Quantum factor: the Paul trap used by Monz and colleagues. (Courtesy: C Lackner/Quantum Optics and Spectroscopy Group, University of Innsbruck) A quantum computer made of five trapped ions has been ...

A team of researchers in China has unveiled a technique that—theoretically—could crack the most common methods used to ensure digital privacy, using a rudimentary quantum computer. The technique ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Computer security experts were struggling this week to assess a startling claim by Chinese researchers that ...