Ph219/CS219
Quantum Computation
2011

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Course description: This one-term course covers quantum error correction, fault-tolerant quantum computation, and quantum information theory.

Class meetings: Monday and Wednesday 1:00-2:30 in 269 Lauritsen, from 3 January 2011 through 9 March 2011. There will be no lecture on Feb. 7 or Feb. 9. These lectures have been rescheduled for Friday Feb. 18 2:00-3:30 and Friday Feb. 25 1:00-2:30 in 269 Lauritsen.

Instructor:
John Preskill , 206 Annenberg, X-6691, email: preskill@theory.caltech.edu

Teaching assistant:

Isaac Kim, 229 Annenberg, email: ikim@caltech.edu, office hours: Friday 3pm to 5pm.

Lectures and references:
The primary reference for most of the lectures will be these lecture notes (JP). Other useful references are Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Nielsen and Chuang (NC), and Classical and Quantum Computation by Kitaev, Shen, and Vyalyi (KSV)..

Tentative course outline:
The reference for the first five lectures of the second term is JP, Chapter 7 (Quantum error correction), Sec. 1-10, 14, 15.1.
Jan. 3: Concept of a quantum error-correcting code and the error correction criteria
Jan. 5, 10: Classical binary linear codes, quantum CSS codes, stabilizer codes
Jan. 12: The five-qubit code, existence of good stabilizer codes
Jan. 19: Concatenated quantum codes, toric code

A good reference for the next few lectures is arXiv:0904.2557 .
Jan. 24, 26: Toric code recovery, fault-tolerant recovery (lecture notes)
Jan. 31, Feb. 2: Fault-tolerant quantum gates (lecture notes)
Feb. 7, 9: No class
Feb. 14, 16, 18: Quantum accuracy threshold theorem
Feb. 23, 25:  Shannon entropy, classical compression, Von Neumann entropy, quantum compression, entanglement cost and distillable entanglement
Feb. 28, Mar. 2: Strong subadditivity, accessible information (lecture notes), classical noisy channel coding theorem (lecture notes)
Mar. 7, Mar. 9: Capacities of quantum channels, mother and father protocols and their children (lecture notes)

Homework assignments: 
All students taking the course for credit are required to do the homework, which will be assigned several times each term.  You can hand in the homework in class on the due date, or leave it in Isaac Kim’s mailbox, on the 3rd floor of Annenberg.

Problem Set 1 [PDF] (posted Monday 24 January 2011; due Wednesday 9 February 2011).
Problem Set 2 [PDF] (posted Saturday 5 February 2011; due Wednesday 23 February 2011).
Problem Set 3 [PDF] (posted Thursday 24 February 2011; due Wednesday 9 March 2011).