Information is something that can be encoded in the state of a physical system, and a computation is a task that can be performed with a physically realizable device. Therefore, since the physical world is fundamentally quantum mechanical, the foundations of information theory and computer science should be sought in quantum physics. In fact, quantum information has weird properties that contrast sharply with the familiar properties of classical information. A quantum computer -- a new type of machine that exploits the quantum properties of infomation -- could perform certain typ$s of calculations far more efficiently than any foreseeable classical computer. To build a functional quantum computer will be an enormous technical challenge. New methods for quantum error correction are being developed that can help to prevent a quantum computer from crashing.
Information is something that can be encoded in the state of a physical system, and a computation is a task that can be performed with a physically realizable device. Therefore, since the physical world is fundamentally quantum mechanical, the foundations of information theory and computer science should be sought in quantum physics. In fact, quantum information has weird properties that contrast sharply with the familiar properties of classical information. A quantum computer -- a new type of machine that exploits the quantum properties of infomation -- could perform certain typ$s of calculations far more efficiently than any foreseeable classical computer. To build a functional quantum computer will be an enormous technical challenge. New methods for quantum error correction are being developed that can help to prevent a quantum computer from crashing.
Information is something that can be encoded in the state of a physical system, and a computation is a task that can be performed with a physically realizable device. Therefore, since the physical world is fundamentally quantum mechanical, the foundations of information theory and computer science should be sought in quantum physics. In fact, quantum information has weird properties that contrast sharply with the familiar properties of classical information. A quantum computer-a new type of machine that exploits the quantum properties of information could perform certain types of calculations far more efficiently than any foreseeable classical computer. To build a functional quantum computer will be an enormous technical challenge. New methods for quantum error correction are being developed that can help to prevent a quantum computer from crashing.
Information is something that can be encoded in the state of a physical system, and a computation is a task that can be performed with a physically realizable device. Therefore, since the physical world is fundamentally quantum mechanical, the foundations of information theory and computer science should be sought in quantum physics. In fact, quantum information has weird properties that contrast sharply with the familiar properties of classical information. A quantum computer-a new type of machine that exploits the quantum properties of information-could perform certain types of calculations far more efficiently than any foreseeable classical computer. To build a functional quantum computer will be an enormous technical challenge. New methods for quantum error correction are being developed that can help to prevent a quantum computer from crashing.
The subject of quantum computing brings together ideas from classical information theory, computer science, and quantum physics. This review aims to summarize not just quantum computing, but the whole subject of quantum information theory. Information can be identified as the most general thing which must propagate from a cause to an effect. It therefore has a fundamentally important role in the science of physics. However, the mathematical treatment of information, especially information processing, is quite recent, dating from the mid-20th century. This has meant that the full significance of information as a basic concept in physics is only now being discovered. This is especially true in quantum mechanics. The theory of quantum information and computing puts this significance on a firm footing, and has led to some profound and exciting new insights into the natural world. Among these are the use of quantum states to permit the secure transmission of classical information (quantum cryptography), the use of quantum entanglement to permit reliable transmission of quantum states (teleportation), the possibility of preserving quantum coherence in the presence of irreversible noise processes (quantum error correction), and the use of controlled quantum evolution for efficient computation (quantum computation). The common theme of all these insights is the use of quantum entanglement as a computational resource. It turns out that information theory and quantum mechanics fit together very well. In order to explain their relationship, this review begins with an introduction to classical information theory and computer science, including Shannon's theorem, error correcting codes, Turing machines and computational complexity. The principles of quantum mechanics are then outlined, and the Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) experiment described. The EPR-Bell correlations, and quantum entanglement in general, form the essential new ingredient which distinguishes quantum from classical information theory and, arguably, quantum from classical physics. Basic quantum information ideas are next outlined, including qubits and data compression, quantum gates, the `no cloning' property and teleportation. Quantum cryptography is briefly sketched. The universal quantum computer (QC) is described, based on the Church-Turing principle and a network model of computation. Algorithms for such a computer are discussed, especially those for finding the period of a function, and searching a random list. Such algorithms prove that a QC of sufficiently precise construction is not only fundamentally different from any computer which can only manipulate classical information, but can compute a small class of functions with greater efficiency. This implies that some important computational tasks are impossible for any device apart from a QC. To build a universal QC is well beyond the abilities of current technology. However, the principles of quantum information physics can be tested on smaller devices. The current experimental situation is reviewed, with emphasis on the linear ion trap, high- Q optical cavities, and nuclear magnetic resonance methods. These allow coherent control in a Hilbert space of eight dimensions (three qubits) and should be extendable up to a thousand or more dimensions (10 qubits). Among other things, these systems will allow the feasibility of quantum computing to be assessed. In fact such experiments are so difficult that it seemed likely until recently that a practically useful QC (requiring, say, 1000 qubits) was actually ruled out by considerations of experimental imprecision and the unavoidable coupling between any system and its environment. However, a further fundamental part of quantum information physics provides a solution to this impasse. This is quantum error correction (QEC). An introduction to QEC is provided. The evolution of the QC is restricted to a carefully chosen subspace of its Hilbert space. Errors are almost certain to cause a departure from this subspace. QEC provides a means to detect and undo such departures without upsetting the quantum computation. This achieves the apparently impossible, since the computation preserves quantum coherence even though during its course all the qubits in the computer will have relaxed spontaneously many times. The review concludes with an outline of the main features of quantum information physics and avenues for future research.
Information is physical: the laws which govern its encoding, processing and communication are bound by those of its unavoidably physical embodiment. In today's informatics, information obeys the laws of Newton's and Maxwell's classical physics: this assertion holds all the way from commercial computers down to (up to?) their most abstract models, e.g. Turing machines and lambda-calculus. Today's computation and communication are classical. Research in quantum information processing and communication was born some twenty five years ago, as a child of two major scientific achievements of the 20th century, namely quantum physics and information sciences. The driving force of this interdisciplinary research is that of looking for the consequences of having information encoding, computation and communication based upon the laws of quantum physics, i.e. the ultimate knowledge that we have, today, of the foreign world of elementary particles, as described by quantum mechanics. Breakthroughs in cryptography, communications, information theory, algorithmics and, more recently, in abstract computational models, programming languages and semantics frameworks, have shown that this transplantation of information from classical to quantum has far reaching consequences, both quantitative and qualitative, and opens new avenues for research within the foundations of computer science.From a computer scientist's point of view, which is my point of view, I will explain the basics, survey the main achievements, and outline the current hot topics and major challenges of this promising and stimulating research. I will not assume any prior knowledge in quantum mechanics from the audience.
The physics and the mathematics of computation are examined to provide a foundation and perspective for the investigation of the quantum mechanics of computation. Our purpose is to explore the fundamental limits and constraints imposed on computation by Nature through the laws of physics and the mathematics of computational complexity. Inasmuch as information storage and transmission are an integral part of computation, their physical bounds are considered. The computer is viewed both physically and mathematically as a dynamical system, and is depicted in terms of the basic Turing machine paradigm. Three fundamental classes of the Turing machine are defined; the deterministic, stochastic and quantum Turing machines. Hamiltonian models and physical realizations of quantum computing are described. Quantum computers can perform some tasks which have no classical analogue, but they cannot compute functions that are non-computable by classical means. Some classically intractable problems can be solved with quantum computers.
Quantum Information Science is a cross-disciplinary subject that has arisen in the last twenty years. It concerns itself with the consequences of our most complete description of the physical world (that is, quantum mechanics) for the reliable, secure, private, and rapid processing of information, both in communication and computation. While its invention is often ascribed to the famous theoretical physicist Richard Feynman in the 1980s, his contributions were only one of many that initiated the field around that time. While he perceived that new types of physical devices, in which the quantum laws of superposition and entanglement function at the logical level, could give new power in the simulation of quantum physics, it was others (Bennett, Brassard) who showed that the uncertainty principle led to fundamentally more secure ways of communicating secret messages. It was yet others (Deutsch, Vazirani) who understood that quantum theory defined a new kind of Turing machine, and that not only quantum physics simulations, but potentially many other computational problems, are sped up in this machine. And it was yet another (Shor) who found a simple, very fast algorithm for prime factorization. The word "qubit" was coined only in 1995. Its introduction is indicative of a new mindset that has developed in recent years for studying and using quantum systems. "Qubit" now stands for a durable paradigm that spans a very wide variety of fields. It thus has many sub-meanings: first, it is the basic abstract unit of information for workers ranging from optical communication engineers to NMR spectroscopists to black-hole theorists. Second, it is the name we now routinely give to physical two level systems, as they are realized by photons, atomic and ionic eigenlevels, electronic and nuclear spin, structural defects in solids, and circulating-current states of superconducting devices. Physics has long dealt with some of these two-level systems, but calling them qubits implies a whole suite of interrelated ideas and capabilities that we ascribe to these systems: the ability to precisely set, and to precisely measure, the quantum state of one unique specimen, to avoid its coupling with the environment while at the same time strongly and controllably coupling the qubits together, to exploit the resulting quantum entanglement as a resource for metrological, cryptographic, and computational tasks. Quantum Information is a very diverse subject pursued today in many different directions, by many hundreds of researchers internationally: In theoretical physics, it has enlivened and sharpened the understanding of efficient representations of entangled many-particle wavefunctions, and has provided the prospect of applications for new concepts such as anyons and majorana fermions. Information theorists has benefitted from having a rigorous extension of the basis of their field, in which classical information theory is subsumed into a greatly broader subject. Theoretical computer scientists continue the search for new quantum algorithms, and have used quantum concepts to prove new results about the classification of computational complexity. Coding theorists have had the new and subtle problem of quantum error correction to analyse and conquer. Most strikingly, the program of experimental physics has been influenced in many directions by Quantum Information Science. State-of-the-art optics experiments transmit quantum states over long distances and perform precision manipulations in single quanta (atomic ions, impurity spins, quantum dots) in the quest to have working quantum cyptography and quantum computing. Quantum Hall systems, and topological insulators, are being assiduously examined for new elementary excitations for use as qubits. In the course of ten years, superconducting devices have improved by over four orders of magnitude in their quantum coherence, a metric made precise by the ideas of quantum computing. [...] DiVincenzo, David