PYL749- Quantum Computation

Problem Set 1 – Basic Ideas

Preliminaries

1. A person can be in one of three spots: her house, her work place or in
gym. Let the respective probabilities be given by ph = 0.25, pw = 0.35.
The set of all events would correspond to the power set (set of all
subsets of the original set). Find the probabilities for all the events
systematically.

2. The probability density for a particle to be at a position x with mo-

mentum p is given by
 −|x|  1
f (x, p) = N exp
X p2 + P2
where X, P are positive constants.

(a) Find the normalisation constant N

(b) Determine the ”uncertainties” ∆x and ∆p.
(c) Study their behaviour of f in the limits X → 0, ∞ and P → 0, ∞.

3. Let pi ; i = 1, · · · , N be the probabilities for a ball to fall in one of the

N slots. Let πi ; i = 1, · · · , N be another set of probabilities. Show
that aPi + bπi are all also allowed probabilities if a, b ≥ 0; a + b = 1.
Such sums are called convex sums.

4. In the previous problem, determine the mean value of N , and also its
standard deviation – for all the three cases. What do you conclude
about the behaviour of standard deviation when you have complex
sums?

5. Work out in detail (whatever was indicated in the class), the relations
among set theoretic operations and Boolean logic. In particular, estab-
lish the correspondence for the basic gates: OR, AND and NAND.