Exhibition of the periodicity of Quantum Fourier Transformation in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

The remarkable capability of quantum Fourier transformation (QFT) to extract the periodicity of a given periodic function has been exhibited by using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques. Two separate sets of experiments were performed. In a full QFT, the periodicity were validated with state tomography and fidelity measurements. For a simplified QFT, the three-qubit pseudo-pure state was created by introducting an additional observer spin, and the spectra recorded on the observer spin showed intuitively the power of QFT\ to find the periodicity. Experimentally realizing the QFT provides a critical step to implement the renowned Shor's quantum factoring algorithm and many other algorithms. Moveover, it can be applied to the study of quantum chaos and other quantum information processing.