Quantum Information : An Overview

In one word, this is a responsible book; the rest is commentary. Around 1992 a few of us were led by Charles Bennett into a Garden of Eden of quantum information, communication, and computation. No sooner had we started exploring our surroundings and naming the birds and the beasts, than Peter Shor put an end to that apparent innocence by showing that factoring could be turned―by means of quantum hardware―into a po- nomial task. Fast factoring meant business; everybody seemed to be awfully interested in factoring. Not that anyone had any use for factoring per se, but it seemed that all the world’s secrets were protected by factor-keyed padlocks. Think of all the power and the glory (and something else) that you might get by acting as a consultant to big businesses and government agencies, helping them pick everyone else’s locks and at the same time build unpickable ones (well, nearly unpickable) for themselves. And if one can get an exponential advantage in factoring, wouldn’t an exponential advantage be lying around the corner for practically any other computational task? Quantum infor- tion “and all that” has indeed blossomed in a few years into a wonderful new chapter of physics, comparable in ?avor and scope to thermodynamics. It has alsoturnedintoaveritable“industry”―producingpapers,conferences,exp- iments, e?ects, devices―even proposals for quantum computer architectures.

Dr. Jaeger is Associate Professor at Boston University. He research focus has been in quantum mechanics, particularly quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum metrology and the foundations of quantum mechanics. He was worked in academia and industry in the United States and Europe as a research director, theorist and experimentalist. He participated in the building of the world's first practical metropolitan area quantum cryptographic network, the DARPA Quantum Network Test-bed, as a member of the Quantum Imaging Laboratory (and more recently the Quantum Communication and Measurement Laboratory) with Boston University's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the BU Photonics Center, along with colleagues at Harvard University and BBN Technologies.