It is now roughly thirty years since the incipient ideas on quantum information science was concretely formalized. Over the last three decades, there has been much development in this field, and at least one technology, namely devices for quantum cryptography, is now commercialized. Yet, the holy grail of a workable quantum computing machine still lies faraway at the horizon. In any case, it took nearly several centuries before the vacuum tubes were invented after the first mechanical calculating were constructed, and several decades later, for the transistor to bring the current computer technology to fruition. In this review, we provide a short survey of the current development and progress in quantum information science. It clearly does not do justice to the amount of work in the past thirty years. Nevertheless, despite the modest attempt, this review hopes to induce younger researchers into this exciting field.
This article highlights synergies between quantum information science (QIS) and operations research for QIS-curious operations researchers (and vice versa), and the author challenges the community to discover more. History: This “Challenge” paper was invited by the Editor in Chief and based on the topics raised by the author at his plenary address at the 2022 INFORMS Computing Society Conference in Tampa, Florida. Funding: This material is based on work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Accelerated Research in Quantum Computing, Fundamental Algorithmic Research for Quantum Computing. This article has been authored by an employee of National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, under Contract DE-NA0003525 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
This volume is based on lectures delivered at the 2009 AMS Short Course on Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, held January 3-4, 2009, in Washington, D.C. Part I of this volume consists of two papers giving introductory surveys of many of the important topics in the newly emerging field of quantum computation and quantum information, i.e., quantum information science (QIS). The first paper discusses many of the fundamental concepts in QIS and ends with the curious and counter-intuitive phenomenon of entanglement concentration. The second gives an introductory survey of quantum error correction and fault tolerance, QIS's first line of defence against quantum decoherence. Part II consists of four papers illustrating how QIS research is currently contributing to the development of new research directions in mathematics. The first paper illustrates how differential geometry can be a fundamental research tool for the development of compilers for quantum computers. The second paper gives a survey of many of the connections between quantum topology and quantum computation. The last two papers give an overview of the new and emerging field of quantum knot theory, an interdisciplinary research field connecting quantum computation and knot theory. These two papers illustrate surprising connections with a number of other fields of mathematics. In the appendix, an introductory survey article is also provided for those readers unfamiliar with quantum mechanics.