Some of the early proof-of-concept and demonstrations of quantum computation made use of spin qubits using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) devices. Chuang and colleagues demonstrated the factoring of the number 15 using Shor’s algorithm in a liquid-state NMR setup.
While the number 15 is trivial to factor, it was one of the first demonstrations that quantum principles translating to realizable system for computation beyond classical systems.
Isaac Chuang is MIT professor. This is his home page: