A Technical seminar Review Report

on

QUANTUM COMPUTING

BACHELOR OF TECHNOLOGY

IN

ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION

ENGENEERING

BY

K.SAI KISHORE -13WJ1A04J8

SCHOOL OF ENGENEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

GURU NANAK INSTITUTIONS TECHNICAL CAMPUS

(An Autonomous Institution, Affiliated by JNTUH)

Ibrahimpatanam - 501506

2016- 2017

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING 1

 GURU NANAK INSTITUTIONS TECHNICAL CAMPUS
SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING

CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the technical seminar entitled “QUANTUM

COMPUTING” has been presented by K.SAI KISHORE
(13WJ1A04J8) in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award
degree of Bachelor of Technology in Electronic & Communication
Engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University,
Hyderabad.

SEMINAR COORDINATOR

Prof. Dr. M.A. KHADAR BABA V .Bhagya Raju

Head of the Department Associate. Professor

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING 2

 CONTENTS
Chapter No Name Page No
CHAPTER-1 - ABSRACT 04
-INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER-2 -WHY 06
QUANTUM COMPUTING
-Prehistory of Quantum Computing
CHAPTER-3 -ENTANGLEMENT 09
CHAPTER-4 -QUANTUM MEMORY 10
CHAPTER-5 -APPLICATIONS 12
CHAPTER-6 -CONCLUSION 18
-REFERENCES

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING 3

 CHAPTER-1
ABSTRACT
The subject of quantum computing brings together ideas from classical information theory,
computer science, and quantum physics. This review aims to summarise not just quantum
computing, but the whole subject of quantum information theory. It turns out that information
theory and quantum mechanics fit together very well. In order to explain their relationship,
the 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 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 described,
including key distribution, teleportation, data compression, quantum error correction, the
universal quantum computer and quantum algorithms. The common theme of all these ideas
is the use of quantum entanglement as a computational resource. Experimental methods for
small quantum processors are briefly sketched, concentrating on ion traps, high Q cavities,
and NMR. The review concludes with an outline of the main features of quantum information
physics, and avenues for future research

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING 4

 INTRODUCTION
Today’s computers—both in theory (Turing machines) and practice (PCs)—are based on classical
physics. However, modern quantum physics tells us that the world behaves quite differently. A
quantum system can be in a superposition of many different states at the same time, and can exhibit
interference effects during the course of its evolution. Moreover, spatially separated quantum systems
may be entangled with each other and operations may have “non-local” effects because of this.
Quantum computation is the field that investigates the computational power and other properties of
computers based on quantum-mechanical principles. An important objective is to find quantum
algorithms that are significantly faster than any classical algorithm solving the same problem. The
field started in the early 1980s with suggestions for analog quantum computers by Yuri Manin [65]
(and appendix of [66]), Richard Feynman [41, 42], and Paul Benioff [14], and reached more digital
ground when in 1985 David Deutsch defined the universal quantum Turing machine [33]. The
following years saw only sparse activity, notably the development of the first algorithms by Deutsch
and Jozsa [35] and by Simon [82], and the development of quantum complexity theory by Bernstein
and Vazirani [18]. However, interest in the field increased tremendously after Peter Shor’s very
surprising discovery of efficient quantum algorithms for the problems of integer factorization and
discrete logarithms in 1994 [81]. Since most of current classical cryptography is based on the
assumption that these two problems are computationally hard, the ability to actually build and use a
quantum computer would allow us to break most current classical cryptographic systems, notably he
Before limiting ourselves to theory, let us say a few words about practice: to what extent will quantum
computers ever be built? At this point in time, it is just too early to tell. The first small 2-qubit
quantum computer was built in 1997 and 2001 a 5-qubit quantum computer was used to successfully
factor the number 15 [85]. Since then, experimental progress on a number of different technologies
has been steady but slow. The practical problems facing physical realizations of quantum computers
seem formidable. The problems of noise and decoherence have to some extent been solved in theory
by the discovery of quantum error-correcting codes and fault-tolerant computing (see, e.g., Chapter 14
in these notes or [72, Chapter 10]), but these problems are by no means solved in practice. On the
other hand, we should realize that the field of physical realization of quantum computing is still in its
infancy and that classical computing had to face and solve many formidable technical problems as
well—interestingly, often these problems were even of the same nature as those now faced by
quantum computing (e.g., noise-reduction and error-correction). Moreover, the difficulties facing the
implementation of a full quantum computer may seem daunting, but more limited things involving
quantum communication have already been implemented with some success, for example
teleportation (which is the process of sending qubits using entanglement and classical
communication), and quantum cryptography is nowadays even commercially available. Even if the
theory of quantum computing never materializes to a real physical computer, quantum-mechanical
computers are still an extremely interesting idea which will bear fruit in other areas than practical fast
computing. On the physics side, it may improve our understanding of quantum mechanics. The
emerging theory of entanglement has already done this to some extent. On the computer science side,
the theory of quantum computation generalizes and enriches classical complexity theory and may help
resolve some of its problems

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING 5

 CHAPTER-2
Why Quantum Computing
Quantum computing is without doubt one of the hottest topics at the current frontiers of
computing

or even of the whole scienceIt sounds very attractive and looks very promisingThere are several
natural basic questions to ask before we start to explore the concepts and principles as well as the
mystery and potentials of quantum computing Why to consider quantum computing at all The
development of classical computers is still making enormous progress and no end of that seems to be
in
sightMoreover

the design of quantum computers seems to be very questionable and almost surely enormously
expensiveAll this is
trueHowever

there are at least four very good reasons for exploring quantum computing as much as
possibleQuantum computing is a challengeA very fundamental and very natural
challengeIndeed

according to our current

knowledge

our physical world is fundamentally quantum mechanicalAll computers are physical devices and all
real computations are physical processesIt is therefore a fundamental
challenge

and actually our

duty

to explore the
potentials

laws and limitations of quantum mechanics to perform infor mation processing and
communicationAll classical computers and models of
computers

see Gruska

are based on classical physics even if this is rarely mentioned

explicitly

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING 6

and therefore they are not fully adequateThere is nothing wrong with
them

but they do not seem to explore fully the potential of the physical world for information
processingThey are good and
powerful

but they should not be seen as reecting our full view of information processing
systemsMoreover

theoretical results obtained so far provide evidence that quantum compu tation represents the rst real
challenge to the
modern

eciency
oriented

version of the ChurchTuring thesis Any reasonable model of computation can be eciently simulated
by proba bilistic Turing
machines

Quantum computing seems to be a must and actually our destinyAs miniaturization of computing
devices
continues

we are rapidly approaching the microscopic

level

where the laws of the quantum world dominate By Keyes

an extrapolation of the progress in miniaturization shows that around computing should be performed
at the atomic levelAt that
time

if the development keeps continuing as

hitherto

one electron should be enough to store one

bit

and the energy dissipation of kT ln should be sucient to process one

bitThus

not only scientic curiosity and

challenges

but also technological progress requires that the resources and potentials of quantum computing be

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING 7

fully
explored

Quantum computing is a potentialThere are already results convincingly demon strating that for some
important practical problems quantum computers are theoret ically exponentially more powerful than
classical computersSuch
results

as Shors factorization
algorithm

can be seen as apt kil lers for quantum computing and have enormously increased activity in this
areaIn
addition

the laws of quantum

world

harvested through quantum

cryptography

can
oer

in view of our current

knowledge

unconditional security of
communication

unachievable by classical
meansFinally

the development of quantum computing is a drive and gives new impetus to explore in more detail
and from new points of view
concepts

potentials

laws and limitations of the quantum world and to improve our knowledge of the natural worldThe
study of information processing
laws

limitations and potentials is nowadays in general a powerful methodology to extend our

knowledge

and this seems to be partic ularly true for quantum mechanics Information is being identied as one of
the basic At t

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING 8

Prehistory of Quantum Computing
we have been witnessing a rapid growth of the raw performance of computers with respect to their
speed and memory sizeAn important step in this development was the invention of
transistors

which already use some quantum eects in their

operationHowever

it is clear that if such an increase in performance of computers

continues

then after
years

our chips will have to contain gates and operate at a Hz clock rate Ththus delivering

logic operations per second It seems that the only way to achieve that is to learn to build computers
directly out of the laws of quantum physicsIn order to come up seriously with the idea of quantum
information
processing

and to develop it so far and so

fast

it has been necessary to overcome several intellectual barriersThe most basic one concerned an
important feature of quantum physicsreversibility see Section None of the known models of universal
computers was reversible This barrier was overcome rst by Bennett

who showed the existence of universal re versible Turing

machines

and then by Tooli

and Fredkin and Tooli

who showed the existence of universal classical reversible gates The second intellectual barrier was
overcome by Benio

awho showed that quantum mechanical computational processes can be at least as powerful as
classical computational processesHe did that by showing how a quantum system can simulate actions
of the classical reversible Turing
machinesHowever

his quantum computerwas not fully quantum yet and could not outperform classical ones The
overcoming of these basic intellectual barriers had signicant and broad conse quencesRelations

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING 9

between physics and computation started to be investigated on a more general and deeper level This
has also been due to the fact that reversibility results implied the theoretical possibility of zeroenergy
computations

A Workshop on Physics and Computation started to be organized and in his keynote speech at the rst
of these
workshops

in

R Feynman asked an important question Can quantum physics be eciently simulated by classical
computersAt the same time he showed good reasons to believe that the answer is
negativeNamely

that it appears to be impossible to simulate a general quantum physical system on a probabilistic

Turing machine without an exponential slowdown
Moreover

he speculated that one could deal with the problem by allowing computers to run according to the
laws of quantum mechanicsIn other
words

that quantum computers could be exponentially more powerful than classical ones and could Due The
third intellectual barrier that had to be overcome was a lack of a proper model for a universal quantum
computing device capable of simulating eectively any other quantum computer The rst step to
overcome this barrier was done by Deutsch who elaborated Feynmans ideas and developed a
theoreticallyphysically realisable model of quantum
computers

a quantum physical analogue of a probabilistic Turing

machine

which makes full use of the quantum superposition

principle

and on any given input produces a random sample from a probability distributionDeutsch conjectured
that it might be more ecient than a classical Turing machine for certain computations He also showed
the existence of a universal quantum Turing machine that could consequently simulate any physical
process and experimentand also a model of quantum networksa quantum analog of classical
sequential logical
circuitsHowever

his model of the universal Turing machine had the drawback that the simulation of other quantum
Turing machines
QTM

could be exponential This problem was then overcome by Bernstein and Vazirani
and Yao

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING

10
They showed the existence of universal quantum Turing machines capable of simulating other
quantum Turing machines in polynomial time For a full proof see Bern stein and Vazirani The paper
of Bernstein and Vazirani
laid the foundations of quantum complexity theoryIn
addition

Yao
showed that QTM and quantum circuits compute in polynomial time the same class of functionsThis
result implies that the concept of quantum computation in polynomial time is robust enough and
independent of the machine models In parallel with the development of the basic models of quantum
computing an eort was put into overcoming the fourth intellectual barrierCan quantum computing be
really more powerful than classical computing Are there some good reasons to assume that quantum
computing could bring an essential exponentialspeedup of computations for at least some important
information processing problems This was a very important issue because it was clear that any design
of a quantum computer would require overcoming a number of large scientic and engineering barriers
and therefore it was needed to know whether the proposed model of quantum computer
oers

at least
theoretically

any substantial benet over the classical computersIn spite of the fact that this problem has not yet been
completely resolved there is already strong evidence that this is so It was rst shown by Deutsch and
Jozsa

that there are problems unknown to be in P that could be solved in polynomial time on quantum
computers

and therefore belong to the class QEP of problems solvable with certainty in polynomial time on
quantum computersBy recasting the original Deutsch-Jozsa
problem

in the framework of socalled promise

problems

Berthiaume and Brassard proved the rst separation results in the relativized quantum complexity
theoryFor
example

they showed that there is an oracle A such that QEPA ZPPAthey proved the existence of an oracle for
which there are computational problems that QTM can solve in polynomial time with
certainty

but each probabilistic Turing machine to solve these problems with certainty needs exponential time
for some inputs These results were rst improved by Bernstein and R

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING

11
 CHAPTER-3
ENTANGLMENT

Two classical bits can be 00 or 01 or 10 or 11. We can ask the value of the first bit without affecting
the second bit. Two qubits could be in the state 1 / 2 (|01> + |10>) The first qubit is neither |0> nor
|1>. It’s not even a superposition of |0> and |1> because the state is not separable: the value of the first
qubit is entangled with the value of the second. We can’t discover value of first qubit without
affecting the second. Say we measure it and get 0; that means the state of the system is now |01> |1>

This is the remarkable thing about entanglement. By measuring one qubit we can affect the
probability amplitudes of the other qubits in a system! How to think about this process in an abstract
way is an open challenge in quantum computing. The difficulty is the lack of any classical analog.
One useful, but imprecise way to think about entanglement, superposition and measurement is that
superposition “is” quantum information. Entanglement links that information across quantum bits, but
does not create any more of it. Measurement “destroys” quantum information turning it into classical.

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING

12
Thus think of an EPR pair as having as much “superposition” as an unentangled set of qubits, one in a
superposition between zero and one, and another in a pure state. The superposition in the EPR pair is
simply linked across qubits instead of being isolated in one. This, admittedly fuzzy way of thinking
about these concepts is useful when we examine teleportation. There we insert an unknown quantum
state (carrying a fixed amount of “quantum information”) into a system of qubits. We mix them about
with additional superposition and entanglement and then measure out the superposition we just added.
The net effect is the unknown quantum state remains in the joint system of qubits, albeit migrated
through entanglement to another physical qubit.

CHAPTER-4
QUANTUM MEMORY
In classical computation, the unit of information is a bit, which can be 0 or 1. In quantum
computation, this unit is a quantum bit (qubit), which is a superposition of 0 and 1. Consider a system
with 2 basis states, call them |0i and |1i. We identify these basis states with the vectors 1 0 and 0 1 ,
respectively. A single qubit can be in any superposition α0|0i + α1|1i, |α0| 2 + |α1| 2 = 1. Accordingly,
a single qubit “lives” in the vector space C 2 . Similarly we can think of systems of more than 1 qubit,

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING

13
which “live” in the tensor product space of several qubit systems. For instance, a 2-qubit system has 4
basis states: |0i ⊗ |0i, |0i ⊗ |1i, |1i ⊗ |0i, |1i ⊗ |1i. Here for instance |1i ⊗ |0i means that the first
qubit is in its basis state |1i and the second qubit is in its basis state |0i. We will often abbreviate this
to |1i|0i, |1, 0i, or even |10i. More generally, a register of n qubits has 2n basis states, each of the form
|b1i⊗|b2i⊗. . .⊗|bni, with bi ∈ {0, 1}. We can abbreviate this to |b1b2 . . . bni. We will often
abbreviate 0 . . . 0 to 0n . Since bitstrings of length n can be viewed as numbers between 0 and 2n − 1,
we can also writeSuch 2-qubit states are sometimes called EPR-pairs in honor of Einstein, Podolsky,
and Rosen [39], who first examined such states and their seemingly paradoxical properties. Initially
neither of the two qubits has a classical value |0i or |1i. However, if we measure the first qubit and

observe, say, a |0i, then the whole state collapses to |00i. Thus observing the first qubit immediately
fixes also the second, unobserved qubit to a classical value. Since the two qubits that make up the
register may be far apart, this example illustrates some of the non-local effects that quantum systems
can exhibit. In general, a bipartite state |φi is called entangled if it cannot be written as a tensor
product |φAi ⊗ |φBi where |φAi lives in the first space and |φBi lives in the second. At this point, a
comparison with classical probability distributions may be helpful. Suppose we have two probability
spaces, A and B, the first with 2n possible outcomes, the second with 2m possible outcomes. A
distribution on the first space can be described by 2n numbers (non-negative reals summing to 1;
actually there are only 2n − 1 degrees of freedom here) and a distribution on the second by 2m
numbers. Accordingly, a product distribution on the joint space can be described by 2n + 2m numbers.
However, an arbitrary (non-product) distribution on the joint space takes 2n+m real numbers, since
there are 2n+m possible outcomes in total. Analogously, an n-qubit state |φAi can be described by 2n
numbers (complex numbers whose squared moduli sum to 1), an m-qubit state |φBi by 2m numbers,
and their tensor product |φAi ⊗ |φBi by 2n + 2m numbers. However, an arbitrary (possibly entangled)
state in the joint space takes 2n+m numbers, since it lives in a 2n+m-dimensional space. We see that
the number of parameters required to describe quantum states is the same as the number of parameters
needed to describe probability distributions. Also note the analogy between statistical independence1
of two random variables A and B and non-entanglement of the product state |φAi ⊗ |φBi. However,
despite the similarities between probabilities and amplitudes, quantum states are much more powerful
than distributions, because amplitudes may have negative parts which can lead to interference effects.
Amplitudes only become probabilities when we square them. The art of quantum computing is to use
these special properties for interesting computational purposes

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING

14
 CHAPTER-5
APPLICATIONS
hen I was in middle school, I read a popular book about programming in BASIC
(which was the most popular programming language for beginners at that time).
But it was 1986, and we did not have computers at home or school yet. So, I could
only write computer programs on paper, without being able to try them on an
actual computer.

Surprisingly, I am now doing something similar—I am studying how to solve

problems on a quantum computer. We do not yet have a fully functional quantum
computer. But I am trying to figure out what quantum computers will be able to do
when we build them.

The story of quantum computers begins in 1981 with Richard Feynman,

probably the most famous physicist of his time. At a conference on physics and
computation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Feynman asked the
question: Can we simulate physics on a computer?

The answer was—not exactly. Or, more precisely—not all of physics. One of the
branches of physics is quantum mechanics, which studies the laws of nature on the
scale of individual atoms and particles. If we try to simulate quantum mechanics
on a computer, we run into a fundamental problem. The full description of
quantum physics has so many variables that we cannot keep track of all of them on
a computer.

If one particle can be described by two variables, then to describe the most general
state of n particles, we need 2n variables. If we have 100 particles, we need 2100
variables, which is roughly 1 with 30 zeros. This number is so big that computers
will never have so much memory.

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING

15
By itself, this problem was nothing new—many physicists already knew that. But
Feynman took it one step further. He asked whether we could turn this problem
into something positive: If we cannot simulate quantum physics on a computer,
maybe we can build a quantum mechanical computer—which would be better than
the ordinary computers?

This question was asked by the most famous physicist of the time. Yet, over the
next few years, almost nothing happened. The idea of quantum computers was so
new and so unusual that nobody knew how to start thinking about it.

But Feynman kept telling his ideas to others, again and again. He managed to
inspire a small number of people who started thinking: what would a quantum
computer look like? And what would it be able to do?

Quantum mechanics, the basis for quantum computers, emerged from attempts to
understand the nature of matter and light. At the end of the nineteenth century, one
of the big puzzles of physics was color.

The color of an object is determined by the color of the light that it absorbs and the
color of the light that it reflects. On an atomic level, we have electrons rotating
around the nucleus of an atom. An electron can absorb a particle of light (photon),
and this causes the electron to jump to a different orbit around the nucleus.

In the nineteenth century, experiments with heated gasses showed that each type of
atom only absorbs and emits light of some specific frequencies. For
example, visible light emitted by hydrogen atoms only consists of four specific
colors. The big question was: how can we explain that?

Physicists spent decades looking for formulas that would predict the color of the
light emitted by various atoms and models that would explain it. Eventually, this
puzzle was solved by Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1913 when he postulated that
atoms and particles behave according to physical laws that are quite different from
what we see on a macroscopic scale. (In 1922, Bohr, who would become a frequent
Member at the Institute, was awarded a Nobel Prize for this discovery.)

To understand the difference, we can contrast Earth (which is orbiting around the
Sun) and an electron (which is rotating around the nucleus of an atom). Earth can
be at any distance from the Sun. Physical laws do not prohibit the orbit of Earth to
be a hundred meters closer to the Sun or a hundred meters further. In contrast,
Bohr’s model only allows electrons to be in certain orbits and not between those
orbits. Because of this, electrons can only absorb the light of colors that correspond
to a difference between two valid orbits.

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING

16
Around the same time, other puzzles about matter and light were solved
by postulating that atoms and particles behave differently from macroscopic
objects. Eventually, this led to the theory of quantum mechanics, which explains
all of those differences, using a small number of basic principles.

Quantum mechanics has been an object of much debate. Bohr himself said,
“Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it.” Albert
Einstein believed that quantum mechanics should not be correct. And, even today,
popular lectures on quantum mechanics often emphasize the strangeness of
quantum mechanics as one of the main points.

But I have a different opinion. The path of how quantum mechanics was
discovered was very twisted and complicated. But the end result of this path, the
basic principles of quantum mechanics, is quite simple. There are a few things that
are different from classical physics and one has to accept those. But, once you
accept them, quantum mechanics is simple and natural. Essentially, one can think
of quantum mechanics as a generalization of probability theory in which
probabilities can be negative.

In the last decades, research in quantum mechanics has been moving into a new
stage. Earlier, the goal of researchers was to understand the laws of nature
according to how quantum systems function. In many situations, this has been
successfully achieved. The new goal is to manipulate and control quantum systems
so that they behave in a prescribed way.

This brings the spirit of research closer to computer science. Alan Key, a
distinguished computer scientist, once characterized the difference between natural
sciences and computer science in the following way. In natural sciences, Nature
has given us the world, and we just discovered its laws. In computers, we can stuff
the laws into it and create the world. Experiments in quantum physics are now
creating artificial physical systems that obey the laws of quantum mechanics but
do not exist in nature under normal conditions.

An example of such an artificial quantum system is a quantum computer. A

quantum computer encodes information into quantum states and computes by
performing quantum operations on it.

There are several tasks for which a quantum computer will be useful. The one that
is mentioned most frequently is that quantum computers will be able to read secret
messages communicated over the internet using the current technologies (such as
RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and other cryptographic protocols that are based on the
hardness of number-theoretic problems like factoring and discrete logarithm). But
there are many other fascinating applications.

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING

17
First of all, if we have a quantum computer, it will be useful for scientists for
conducting virtual experiments. Quantum computing started with Feynman’s
observation that quantum systems are hard to model on a conventional computer. If
we had a quantum computer, we could use it to model quantum systems. (This is
known as “quantum simulation.”) For example, we could model the behavior of
atoms and particles at unusual conditions (for example, very high energies that can
be only created in the Large Hadron Collider) without actually creating those
unusual conditions. Or we could model chemical reactions—because interactions
among atoms in a chemical reaction is a quantum process.

Another use of quantum computers is searching huge amounts of data. Let’s say
that we have a large phone book, ordered alphabetically by individual names (and
not by phone numbers). If we wanted to find the person who has the phone number
6097348000, we would have to go through the whole phone book and look at
every entry. For a phone book with one million phone numbers, it could take one
million steps. In 1996, Lov Grover from Bell Labs discovered that a quantum
computer would be able to do the same task with one thousand steps instead of one
million.

More generally, quantum computers would be useful whenever we have to find

something in a large amount of data: “a needle in a haystack”—whether this is the
right phone number or something completely different.

Another example of that is if we want to find two equal numbers in a large amount
of data. Again, if we have one million numbers, a classical computer might have to
look at all of them and take one million steps. We discovered that a quantum
computer could do it in a substantially smaller amount of time.

All of these achievements of quantum computing are based on the same effects of
quantum mechanics. On a high level, these are known as quantum parallelism and
quantum interference.

A conventional computer processes information by encoding it into 0s and 1s. If

we have a sequence of thirty 0s and 1s, it has about one billion of possible values.
However, a classical computer can only be in one of these one billion states at the
same time. A quantum computer can be in a quantum combination of all of those
states, called superposition. This allows it to perform one billion or more copies of
a computation at the same time. In a way, this is similar to a parallel computer
with one billion processors performing different computations at the same time—
with one crucial difference. For a parallel computer, we need to have one billion
different processors. In a quantum computer, all one billion computations will be
running on the same hardware. This is known as quantum parallelism.

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING

18
The result of this process is a quantum state that encodes the results of one billion
computations. The challenge for a person who designs algorithms for a quantum
computer (such as myself) is: how do we access these billion results? If we
measured this quantum state, we would get just one of the results. All of the other
999,999,999 results would disappear.

To solve this problem, one uses the second effect, quantum interference. Consider
a process that can arrive at the same outcome in several different ways. In the non-
quantum world, if there are two possible paths toward one result and each path is
taken with a probability ¼, the overall probability of obtaining this result is ¼+¼=
½. Quantumly, the two paths can interfere, increasing the probability of success to
1.

Quantum algorithms combine these two effects. Quantum parallelism is used to

perform a large number of computations at the same time, and quantum
interference is used to combine their results into something that is both meaningful
and can be measured according to the laws of quantum mechanics.

The biggest challenge is building a large-scale quantum computer. There are

several ways one could do it. So far, the best results have been achieved using
trapped ions. An ion is an atom that has lost one or more of its electrons. An ion
trap is a system consisting of electric and magnetic fields, which can capture ions
and keep them at locations. Using an ion trap, one can arrange several ions in a
line, at regular intervals.

One can encode 0 into the lowest energy state of an ion and 1 into a higher energy
state. Then, the computation is performed using light to manipulate the states of
ions. In an experiment by Rainer Blatt’s group at the University of Innsbruck,
Austria, this has been successfully performed for up to fourteen ions. The next step
is to scale the technology up to a bigger number of trapped ions.

There are many other paths toward building a quantum computer. Instead of
trapped ions, one can use electrons or particles of light—photons. One can even
use more complicated objects, for example, the electric current in a
superconductor. A very recent experiment by a group led by John Martinis of the
University of California, Santa Barbara, has shown how to perform quantum
operations on one or two quantum bits with very high precision from 99.4% to
99.92% using the superconductor technology.

The fascinating thing is that all of these physical systems, from atoms to electric
current in a superconductor, behave according to the same physical laws. And they
all can perform quantum computation. Moving forward with any of these
technologies relates to a fundamental problem in experimental physics: isolating

TITLE: QUANTUM COMPUTING

19
quantum systems from environment and controlling them with high precision. This
is a very difficult and, at the same time, a very fundamental task and being able to
control quantum systems will be useful for many other purposes.

Besides building quantum computers, we can use the ideas of information to think
about physical laws in terms of information, in terms of 0s and 1s. This is the way I
learned quantum mechanics—I started as a computer scientist, and I learned
quantum mechanics by learning quantum computing first. And I think this is the
best way to learn quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics can be used to describe many physical systems, and in each
case, there are many technical details that are specific to the particular
physical system. At the same time, there is a common set of core principles that all
of those physical systems obey.

Quantum information abstracts away from the details that are specific to a
particular physical system and focuses on the principles that are common to all
quantum systems. Because of that, studying quantum information illuminates the
basic concepts of quantum mechanics better than anything else. And, one day, this
could become the standard way of learning quantum mechanics.

For myself, the main question still is: how will quantum computers be useful? We
know that they will be faster for many computational tasks, from modeling nature
to searching large amounts of data. I think there are many more applications and,
perhaps, the most important ones are still waiting to be discovered.

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 CHAPTER-6
CONCLUSION
From the dawn of computer science the field has benefited from abstractions which
simulate actual computing devices. Between the Turing machine and the Church-
Turing Thesis a strong foundation was made for study of the computable and
uncomputable. Complexity analysis provides a way to distinguish classes of
problems based on their runtime characteristics, and the rough grouping of
problems of polynomial runtime as tractable and others as intractable combined
with the presumed correctness of the Complexity-Theoretic Church-Turing
hypothesis suggest whether or not a problem is tractable is not depended on the
model of computation used.

Through the principle of superposition in quantum systems we can create useful

memory components that are on the scale of an atom or smaller. These quantum
memory registers may be able to facilitate exponential computational speed
increases in algorithms that can take advantage of quantum parallelism.

Peter Shor has shown an algorithm which makes factoring large numbers tractable
for a quantum computer, where no such algorithm is published for a classical
computer. In doing so has drawn great attention to the field of quantum computing.
Due to Shor's algorithm, we may someday have to turn to other means of
encrypting data than are today typically employed. L. K. Grover's database search
algorithm shows another noteworthy task that a quantum computer can perform
faster than any classical computer.(Brassard)

The efforts to build a real quantum memory register that functions are in the most
preliminary stages. As of the original time of writing this paper, 3-qubit registers
had been built. In 2001 Shor's Algorithm was applied to the number 15 at IBM's
Almaden Research Center and Stanford University. In 2005 the first qubyte (g. 8-
bit quantum register) was created at The Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum
Information at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. In 2009 NIST reads and
writes individual qubits, and demonstrates some computing operations on qubits.
(Timeline of quantum computing)

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Operational quantum computers are by no means an inevitable consequence of this
research. It may be that the problems surrounding keeping a quantum memory
register isolated from any disturbance long enough for a calculation to take place
will be insurmountable. In any case, quantum computing will remain an exciting
topic for experimentalists and theorists alike for years to come. Hopefully this
paper, and the simulation of Shor's algorithm have been as enlightening and fun for
the reader as they were for the author.

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