Physics & Astronomy Colloquium

3:30 PM, Friday, March 23, 2007
Room 155, Chem-Phys Building

Dr. Edward Gerjuoy
Department of Physics
University of Pittsburgh

"An Introduction to Quantum Computing''

This talk is intended for physics graduate students and other physicists who are unacquainted with quantum computing and are interested in an introduction to the subject. Persons who already know something about quantum computing should stay away; they will be bored.
Quantum mechanics, as formulated more than 80 years ago by Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac and other greats, is a wholly sufficient foundation for its modern interrelated subfields of quantum computation (qc) and quantum information (qi), which generally are lumped together into a single subfield (qc/qi). In short qc/qi, though it has been exciting the attention of a very rapidly increasing number of physicists, involves no genuinely new physics. The first portion of this talk will define the fundamental qc component, namely the qubit, and will describe some possible physical realizations of qubits. The talk then will define entanglement and will discuss how entanglement could be used to send messages at faster than light speeds, were it not for the so-called no cloning theorem, whose amazingly simple proof will be presented. The talk will close with a brief discussion of the difficulties facing the actual achievement of useful quantum computers, after an equally brief presentation of the Shor factoring algorithm, which provides the best known illustration of the potential power of qc. The entire talk should be quite comprehensible to any graduate student who has taken an introductory course in quantum mechanics, even if only at the undergraduate level.

Refreshments will be served in CP 179 at 3:15 PM