Quantum Information: An Overview - Hardcover

Jaeger, Gregg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0387357254 ISBN 13: 9780387357256

Publisher: Springer, 2006

Synopsis

In one word, this is a responsible book; the rest is commentary. Around 1992 a few of us were led by Charles Bennett into a Garden of Eden of quantum information, communication, and computation. No sooner had we started exploring our surroundings and naming the birds and the beasts, than Peter Shor put an end to that apparent innocence by showing that factoring could be turned―by means of quantum hardware―into a po- nomial task. Fast factoring meant business; everybody seemed to be awfully interested in factoring. Not that anyone had any use for factoring per se, but it seemed that all the world’s secrets were protected by factor-keyed padlocks. Think of all the power and the glory (and something else) that you might get by acting as a consultant to big businesses and government agencies, helping them pick everyone else’s locks and at the same time build unpickable ones (well, nearly unpickable) for themselves. And if one can get an exponential advantage in factoring, wouldn’t an exponential advantage be lying around the corner for practically any other computational task? Quantum infor- tion “and all that” has indeed blossomed in a few years into a wonderful new chapter of physics, comparable in ?avor and scope to thermodynamics. It has alsoturnedintoaveritable“industry”―producingpapers,conferences,exp- iments, e?ects, devices―even proposals for quantum computer architectures.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Jaeger is a professor at Boston University, where he earned his Ph.D. in Physics with Abner Shimony in 1995.  He has published in a number of areas, including quantum computing, quantum cryptography, foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum metrology, and the history and philosophy of science. He was worked in academia and industry in the United States and Europe as a research director and investigator in quantum information science and quantum metrology. As a member of the Quantum Imaging Laboratory at Boston University’s Photonics Center, along with colleagues at Harvard University and BBN Technologies, he helped build the world’s first practical metropolitan area quantum cryptographic network, the DARPA Quantum Network Test-bed, serving as principal quantum entanglement theorist.

From the Back Cover

This book is a comprehensive yet concise overview of quantum information science, which is a rapidly developing area of interdisciplinary investigation that now plays a significant role in physics, information technology and engineering. It is a handy reference for practitioners and students covering quantum mechanics, quantum key distribution, quantum computation and quantum communication, as well as explicating foundational issues of these topics. Specific protocols for quantum coding, quantum teleportation, quantum key distribution, quantum data compression and entanglement purification are discussed, as are quantum algorithms, including the Deutsch-Jozsa, Shor and Grover algorithms. Appendices on the mathematics of quantum information science and postulates of quantum mechanics are included. The book contains more than 25 illustrations that encapsulate essential ideas and fundamental constructs of quantum information science. The bibliography contains more than 400 articles from the literature of quantum mechanics and information science. Foreword by Prof. Tommaso Toffoli.

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0387357254
• ISBN 13: 9780387357256
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 302