Quantum computation harnesses the power of nature by relying on the properties of quantum systems to both speed up classical computations, as well as to solve problems that are not classically computable. In essence, quantum computation makes use of the wave nature of particles to obtain quantum parallelism. Since qubits (quantum bits1) can exist in a superposition of states, functions operating on qubits are said to simultaneously operate on all the states. Subsequent measurement collapses the state of a qubit to some eigenvalue of the observable being measured. The state of a qubit collapses to certain values with probabilities that are functions of the wave amplitude for the qubit. Hence, a quantum computation will proceed as follows: qubits are prepared in certain states2, they are then operated on by quantum gates (which can be expressed as sequences of unitary operations) which change the state of the system3, and a single measurement can then be performed as the final step of computation. Observation should occur at the end of all other computations because measurement collapses the state of the system, information is lost, and thus subsequent measurements are not possible4. Hence, the goal is to ensure that the computations on the qubits are performed in such a way that the desired answer can be obtained by measuring a single observable of the final system. This is why the design of quantum algorithms requires a fair bit of ingenuity.
ABSTRACT
PUBLICATION RECORD
- Publication year
1995
- Venue
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
- Publication date
1995-10-13
- Fields of study
Not labeled
- Identifiers
- External record
- Source metadata
Semantic Scholar
CITATION MAP
EXTRACTION MAP
CLAIMS
- No claims are published for this paper.
CONCEPTS
- No concepts are published for this paper.
REFERENCES
Showing 1-29 of 29 references · Page 1 of 1