QUANTUM INFORMATION/QUANTUM COMPUTING

The teaching will be centred on hand-in exercises done by you, and detailed comments on the same made by me. This means that we revert to pedagogy as it stood a century ago, when "Hermods" was around. It will be possible to follow the course at-a-distance. In fact there will not be any lectures in the usual sense, although there are complete lecture notes. There will however be discussion meetings at Albanova twice a week, according to the schedule. You are STRONGLY encouraged to attend those if you can. Good physics rests on talking to others. The introductory meeting, on March 22, was on zoom.

A course program is here:

  • Program


    • There will be question sessions at Albanova (FB:41) on Wednesdays and Fridays (13:15 until you run out of questions). Lecture notes are here:

  • Notes for the course

    • (Updated, May 8.)

    There will be "lab"-sessions on May 5, 10, and 12, at 9:30 in A4:3001. Please read the manual beforehand.

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    Some extra remarks from last year include an apology for the early pages of the notes, some remarks about how to handle tensor products , and some remarks on notation .

    There is a book, S. Stenholm and K.-A. Suominen: Quantum Approach to Informatics, Wiley 2005, which presents things somewhat differently from the lecture notes. I recommend you to have a thoughtful look at it.

    For supplementary reading at an easy-to-follow level see for instance J. R. Price: An Introduction to Information Theory, Dover 1980 (for classical information theory) and S. Aaronson: Quantum Computing since Democritus, Cambridge UP 2013. There are many textbooks, including B. Schumacher and M. Westmoreland: Quantum Processes, Systems and Information, Cambridge UP 2010 (introductory), D. Mermin: Quantum Computer Science, Cambridge UP 2007 (very clear-headed), M. M. Wilde: Quantum Information Theory, Cambridge UP 2013 (advanced), and M. A. Nielsen and I. L. Chuang: Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge 2000 (advanced). If you feel a need to read up on classical probability, try H. Cramer: Sannolikhetskalkylen och några av dess användningar (many editions, some in English).

    For geometrical things, look at R. Penrose: The Emperor's New Mind (Oxford UP 1989) and R. Penrose: Shadows of the Mind (Oxford UP 1994). Especially Chapter 6 of the former and Chapter 5 of the latter. Chapter 2 of the former is a very good introduction to Turing machines.

    The manual for the lab session --- I think it should be called that --- is here:

  • here

    Finally, a few more suggestions for reading:

    The "discovery paper" for the connection between the Fisher-Rao distance and quantum mechanics is W. K. Wootters, Phys Rev D23 (1981) 357. Have a look (and when you read it, remember that this had not been explained before).

    A long story about "distinguishability measures", mostly in quantum theory, can be found in     Chris Fuchs' PhD thesis. A more geometric way of looking at things can be found in a book I coauthored, but that's even longer.

    An interesting account of the Bell inequalities is I. Pitowsky, George Boole's 'Conditions of possible experience' and the quantum puzzle, Brit. J. Phi. Sci 45 (1994) 95. I also very much recommend the "invitation" to quantum information theory by     Reinhard Werner .

    For the discovery of how partial transposition helps us to recognize entangled states, see     Peres , and for the observation that this is really about positive maps that are not completely positive see Horodeccy . ("Horodeccy" is "Horodecki" in Polish plural form.)

    It is interesting to read     Peter Shor's own account of his algorithm, since it introduces a lot of perspectives.