Quantum Information: An Overview

Gregg Jaeger

pri 2007 · Springer Science & Business Media

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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.

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Dr. Jaeger is a professor at Boston University, where he earned his Ph.D. in Physics with Abner Shimony in 1995. He has published in a number of areas, including quantum computing, quantum cryptography, foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum metrology, and the history and philosophy of science. He was worked in academia and industry in the United States and Europe as a research director and investigator in quantum information science and quantum metrology. As a member of the Quantum Imaging Laboratory at Boston University’s Photonics Center, along with colleagues at Harvard University and BBN Technologies, he helped build the world’s first practical metropolitan area quantum cryptographic network, the DARPA Quantum Network Test-bed, serving as principal quantum entanglement theorist.