Quantum Information Theory and Computation

instructornicolas macris
officeinr 134
phone+4121 6938114
emailnicolas.macris@epfl.ch
lecturesthursday 9h15-11h00, room INM 203


Special announcements


No prerequisites in quantum mechanics and/or information theory are needed.
A draft of course notes will be updated weekly here current-draft.pdf
This is a 4 credit course. Exam form is oral.

Objectives


The support of information is material. Today one is able to manipulate matter at the nanoscale were quantum behavior becomes important. It is possible that ultimately information processing will have to take into account the laws of quantum physics. This course introduces the theoretical concepts and methods that have been developed in the last 25 years to take advantage of guenuine quantum resources. We will see how the concepts of bit, entropy, and Shannon's theory are extended to the quantum domain. We will emphasize the role of entanglement which is a distinctly quantum feature. We will also see how useful quantum parallelism can be in the theory of quantum computation.

Outline: the course is divided in three parts


  1. Introduction to quantum mechanics, Qbits and quantum cryptography.
  2. Quantum information theory.
  3. Quantum computation, and quantum error correcting codes.


Part 1: QM, Qbits, Cryptography
Experiments with light, analyzers and polarizers homework-19Sept.pdf
Mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics homework-26Sept.pdf
Quantum key distribution protocols homework-17Oct.pdf
Quantum entanglement homework-31Oct.pdf
Part 2: Quantum Information Theory
Density matrix formalism homework-7nov.pdf
Quantum entropy homework-14nov.pdf
Accessible information
Source coding theorem homework-21nov.pdf
Channel capacity theorems
Part 3: Computation and Error Correction
Models of computation and Deutsch-Josza problemhomework-29nov-2013.pdf
Hidden subgroup, period finding, QFT, and Shor algorithmhomework-12Dec-2013.pdf
Search algorithm (Grover)
Quantum error correction


Solutions of Problems



Exam - Presentation Subjects



Subject 1: Security of BB84, securityBB84.pdf and Chuang-Nielsen sec 12.6

Subject 2: Quantum random walks, quantum-random-walk.pdf

Subject 3: Proof of Strong Subadditivity, Chuang-Nielsen sec 11.4 + appendix 6 (Lieb's theorem)

Subject 4: Holevo-Schumacher-Westmoreland theorem (classical-quantum capacity) Chuang-Nielsen sec 12.3.2 pp 554-561 (plus notion of quantum channel)

Subject 5: Entanglement Assisted Capacity, entanglement-assisted-cap.pdf

Subject 6: Error Correcting Codes, Nielsen-Chuang chap 10 and in particular sec 10.5

Subject 7: Entanglement as a Physical Resource, Nilesen-Chuang sec 12.5 and in particular sec 12.5.2

Subject 8: Quantum Fano Inequality and Quantum Data Processing, Chuang and Nielsen sec 12.4.1 + sec 12.4.2

Subject 9: Linear Optical Computing with Photonic Qubits, ReviewModPhys2007.pdf

Subject 10: Bit Commitment, review.pdf, kent1.pdf, kent2.pdf


Papers





For a more physical introduction



To learn quantum mechanics seriously