NEWS
2000/2001
Issue No 10
2000 SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMME
Instructional Course in Quantum
Computing
27-31 March
Organisers: Richard Jozsa (Bristol),
Noah Linden (Bristol),
Angus Macintyre (Edinburgh),
Andrew Pitts (Cambridge)
Supported by:
The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK Quantum Computing Network)
Quantum computing both offers the potential of immense practical computing power and also suggests deep links between the well-established disciplines of quantum theory and information theory and computer science. A notable feature of the subject is its interdisciplinary nature with contributions being made by physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists.
The aim of the instructional course was to provide a comprehensive introduction to current developments in quantum computation/quantum information theory. It was particularly designed to be accessible to computer scientists as well as graduate students and post-docs from other relevant disciplines.
There was enormous demand for this meeting from those working in departments of computing and of mathematics. The total number of participants exceeded 125. Although the majority of participants were younger researchers or research students in UK universities, there were also representatives from Austria, Belgium, Italy, Norway, Spain and the USA.
There were eight speakers, each of whom delivered a ‘mini-course’ or two of three hour-long lectures.
Noah Linden gave an introduction to quantum mechanics and entanglement, covering: state space; qubits; superposition; the concept of entanglement; the idea of unitary operations; measurement/probabilities; the idea of density matrices; measurements on a subsystem; Bell states, GHZ states; and the idea of local operations and classical communication.
Richard Jozsa talked on agorithms and complexity, including: the basic idea of computational complexity; the gate array model of quantum computation; notions of P,BPP,BQP,NP; the Hadamard gate; Deutsch algorithms; periodicity and Fourier transform; Shor’s algorithm; quantum searching and its relation to NP; and the idea of amplitude amplification.
Chris Fuch’s series was on quantum communication, including: the setting of the communication problem; background on Shannon information function; dense coding; general quantum signals (mixed states and von Neumann entropy); Holevo bound; classical information capacity (idea of multiple shots/superadditivity); the idea of quantum information transfer; and the concept of typical subspace and outline of Schumacher compression.
Sandu Popescu talked about quantum information, entanglement manipulations. He re-iterated the idea of quantum information and went on to cover: no-cloning; teleportation; quantifying entanglement; entanglement dilution and concentration in pure states; entanglement purification in mixed states; the idea of bound entanglement; multi-particle entanglement; and the GHZ example.
David Divencenzo’s talks addressed physical implementations, describing the most prominent proposals for physical implementation of quantum computation and going on to explain the idea of decoherence and discuss assessment of limitations of proposals.
Andrew Steane talked about quantum error correction, fault tolerance. He covered: the idea of error correcting codes; model of errors in quantum states (reduction of general errors to three basic kinds); the basic role of Hadamard gate; a simple example of a quantum error correcting code; the basic idea of fault tolerance; and a statement of the main theorem.
Harry Buhrman addressed the limitations of quantum computing and quantum communication complexity. He talked about: an introduction to communication complexity; the polynomial method and how to use it to prove impossibility results with respect to quantum computing; the relation between these results and complexity theory; quantum communication complexity; extension to the quantum setting (exchanging qubits, and/or prior shared entanglement); and a discussion of basic results comparing classical and quantum communication complexity.
Hoi-Kwong Lo talked about quantum cryptography, covering: the idea of key distribution; basic quantum protocols; a discussion of security; and other cryptographic tasks, for example quantum money, bit commitment.
Return to Contents List
Participants:
Adami, Riccardo, Universita’ di Roma “La Sapienza”
Altebaeumer, Thomas, University of Cambridge
Amakawa, Shuhei, University of Cambridge
Angelakis, Dimitris, Imperial College, London
Atkinson-Abutridy, John, University of Edinburgh
Ayer, Elizabeth, Cambridge University
Bagan, Emili, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Bailey, William, University of London
Barnes, Crispin, University of Cambridge
Barrett, Jonathan, University of Cambridge
Barrett, Sean, University of Cambridge
Basoalto, Roberto, Queen Mary & Westfield College
Biris, Elias, University of Edinburgh
Bowdrey, Mark, University of Oxford
Bub, Jeffrey, University of Maryland
Buhrman, Harry, Center for Math and Comp Science (CWI)
Burnett, Ronan, University of Edinburgh
Butterfield, Jeremy, All Souls College
Cain, Paul, Cambridge University
Carteret, Hilary, University of York
Chahboune, Toufik, Queen Mary & Westfield College
Chefles, Anthony, University of Hertfordshire
Chung, William, Imperial College, London
Cinchetti, Mirko, National University of Ireland
Clark, John, University of York
Collins, Daniel, Bristol University
DiVincenzo, David, IBM T J Watson Research Center
Dovinos, Dimitri, Cambridge University
Ericsson, Marie, University of Oxford
Ferguson, Andrew, Cambridge University
Floratos, Ioannis, University of Durham
Foden, Clare, Toshiba Research Europe Ltd
Fuchs, Chris, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Fuentes-Guridi, Ivette, Imperial College
Giuntini, Roberto, University of Cagliari
Glasson, Philip, Royal Holloway College
Goran, Bage, Ericsson Radio Systems
Gorse, Denise, University College, London
Heckmann, Reinhold, Imperial College
Heide, Gerhard, University of East Anglia
Hong, Tianyang, Imperial College
Hovland, Tor, National University of Ireland
Hunt, Matthew, Imperial College
Iblisdir, Sofyan, Univ Libre de Bruxelles-EP
Ionicioiu, Radu, University of Cambridge
Iorio, Alfredo, Trinity College, Dublin
Jackson, Paul, University of Edinburgh
Jensen, Jens G, Royal Holloway College
Johnson, Colin G, University of Kent
Johnston, Des, Heriot-Watt University
Jozsa, Richard, University of Bristol
Kaestner, Bernd, University of Cambridge
Kendon, Viv, University of Strathclyde
Kennedy, Anthony, University of Edinburgh
Kok, Pieter, University of Wales, Bangor
Kuhn, Markus, Unviersity of Cambridge
Kurtz, Cornelius, University of East Anglia
Lamas, Antia, Oxford University
Lange, Martin, University of Edinburgh
Lavelle, Martin, University of Plymouth
Leadbeater, Mark, Toshiba Research Europe Ltd
Linden, Noah, University of Bristol
Lo, Hoi Kwong, MagiQ Technologies, Inc.
Lucas, David, Oxford University
MacIntyre, Angus, University of Edinburgh
Markopoulou, Fotini, Imperial College
Maroney, Owen, Birkbeck College
Massey, Paul, University of York
McMullan, David, University of Plymouth
Menni, Matias, University of Edinburgh
Miles, Richard, University of East Anglia
Morais, Jose-Enrique, Universidad Publica de Navarra
Moschner, Markus, Technical University of Vienna
Ng, Ranick, University of Cambridge
O’Boyle, Michael, University of Edinburgh
O’Donnell, John, University of Glasgow
Oi, Daniel, University of Oxford
Pappas, Alexandros, Imperial College
Parastatidis, Savas, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Parker, Matthew, University of Bergen, Norway
Parker, Stephen, Imperial College
Pati, Arun Kumar, University of Wales
Perkins, Tim, University of Bristol
Pitts, Andrew, Cambridge University
Popescu, Anca, Cambridge University
Popescu, Sandu, University of Bristol
Presnell, Stuart, University of Warwick
Puttock, Sian, University of Leeds
Rallan, Luke, University of Oxford
Ramsay, Andrew, University of Cambridge
Revez Omar, Yasser, University of Oxford
Rickles, Dean, Sheffield University
Rudloff, Christian, University of East Anglia
Rueger, Stefan, Imperial College
Sampath, Prahladavaradan, Imperial College
Schuster, Alfons, University of Ulster
Scovell, Robert, University of Bristol
Seevinck, Michael, Oxford University
Selsto, Solve, University of Bergen
Severini, Simone, University of Florence
Shannon, Nicholas, University of Warwick
Shenker, Orly R., Hebrew Unviersity of Jerusalem
Shi, Yu, University of Cambridge
Shields, Andrew, Toshiba Research Europe Ltd
Short, Anthony, University of Oxford
Siddharthan, Advaith, University of Cambridge
Simpson, Duncan, University of Southampton
Son, Jung-Bae, University of Edinburgh
Sprevak, Daniel, University of Ulster
Steane, Andrew, Oxford University
Stewart, Iain, Imperial College
Svandal, Atle, Unviersity of Bergen
Tapia, Ramon, Universitat Autonoma Barcelona
Tatai, Gabor, University College London
Templeton, Joe, University of Cambridge
Thompson, Katie, University of East Anglia
Tregenna, Ben, Imperial College
Tzamtzis, George, Unviersity of Durham
van Rijsbergen, Keith, University of Glasgow
Virmani, Shashank, Imperial College
Walters, Mark, University of Cambridge
Wehr, Martin, University of Edinburgh
Whitaker, Andrew, Queen’s University, Belfast
Whittaker, David, Toshiba Research Europe Ltd
Whitty, Robin, South Bank University
Williams, David, Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory
Wills, Sebastian, University of Cambridge
Zuliani, Paolo, Oxford University Computing Laboratory
Return to Contents List