Entanglement, quantum phase transitions and quantum algorithms
From the seminal ideas of Feynman and until now, quantum information and computation has been a rapidly evolving field. While at the beginning, physicists looked at quantum mechanics as a theoretical framework to describe the fundamental processes that take place in Nature, it was during the 80’s an...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2006 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | CBUC, CESCA |
| Repositorio: | TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/482202 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10803/482202 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Ordinadors quàntics Ordenadores cuánticos Quantum computers Teoria quàntica Teoría cuántica Quantum theory Algorismes computacionals Algoritmos computacionales Computer algorithms Teoria de la informació Teoría de la información Information theory Ciències Experimentals i Matemàtiques 53 |
| Sumario: | From the seminal ideas of Feynman and until now, quantum information and computation has been a rapidly evolving field. While at the beginning, physicists looked at quantum mechanics as a theoretical framework to describe the fundamental processes that take place in Nature, it was during the 80’s and 90’s that people began to think about the intrinsic quantum behavior of our world as a tool to eventually develop powerful information technologies. As Landauer pointed out, information is physical, so it should not look strange to try to bring together quantum mechanics and information theory. Indeed, it was soon realized that it is possible to use the laws of quantum physics to perform tasks which are unconceivable within the framework of classical physics. For instance, the discovery of quantum teleportation, superdense coding, quantum cryptography, Shor’s factorization algorithm or Grover’s searching algorithm, are some of the remarkable achievements that have attracted the attention of many people, both scientists and non-scientists. This settles down quantum information as a genuine interdisciplinary field, bringing together researchers from different branches of physics, mathematics and engineering. While until recently it was mostly quantum information science that benefited from other fields, today the tools developed within its framework can be used to study problems of different areas, like quantum many-body physics or quantum field theory. The basic reason behind that is the fact that quantum information develops a detailed study of quantum correlations, or quantum entanglement. Any physical system described by the laws of quantum mechanics can then be considered from the perspective of quantum information by means of entanglement theory. It is the purpose of this introduction to give some elementary background about basic concepts of quantum information and computation, together with its possible relation to other fields of physics, like quantum many-body physics. We begin by considering the definition of a qubit, and move then towards the definition of entanglement and the convertibility properties of pure states by introducing majorization and the von Neumann entropy. Then, we consider the notions of quantum circuit and quantum adiabatic algorithm, and move towards what is typically understood by a quantum phase transition, briefly sketching how this relates to renormalization and conformal field theory. We also comment briefly on some possible experimental implementations of quantum computers |
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