Announcements

• [June 6] The Final paper is due via email on Friday, June 15. See the second slide of Week 10 for some last minute advice.
• [June 6] The Slides of Week 9 and 10 are posted.
• [May 29] Slides of Week 8 posted.
• [May 22] My office moved to Harold Frank Hall, room 2151.
• [May 14] Slides of Monday Week 7 posted. See Slide 2 for some last minute information on this Wednesday's Midterm.
• [May 13] The slides of Week 1 through 6, relevant for the Midterm on Wednesday May 16, have been posted both as pdf and as ppt files. If somebody is capable of turning them into proper black and white files, let me know and I will post those as well.
• [May 10] Answers to Exercises I posted. (Admittedly, Question 1 was kind of messy.)
• [May 9] Answers to Exercises II posted.
• [May 9] Slides of Week 6 posted.
• [May 5] Just to be clear: there will be no class today, Saturday May 5.
• [May 3] Slides of Wednesday Week 5 posted.
• [April 30] Exercises II posted; see also the question on the last slide of Monday Week 5.
• [April 30] Slides of Saturday Week 4 and Monday Week 5 are posted.
• [April 26] Slides of Monday and Wednesday, Week 4 are posted.
• [April 24] An extra class is scheduled for Saturday April 28, 10:00 - 11:50 am in PHELPS 1401.
• [April 12] There will be no class on Monday April 16 and Wednesday April 18. Instead, please read up on the first four chapters of the textbook and the first set of notes. Also, try to solve the posted exercises.
• [April 12] Slides, Notes and Exercises of Week 2 posted.
• [April 5] Slides of Week 1 have been posted.
• [March 28] Due to some unimportant formalities this course had to be cross listed as a Physics 250, "Special topics in Astrophysics" graduate course. Please ignore the "astrophysics" part of the title.
• [March 21, 2007] Welcome to the CS290/Phys250 web site.

Course Info

Professor:

• Wim van Dam (vandam@cs)
  Harold Frank Hall, Room 2151

Formalities:

• ID: CMPSC 290A - Special Topics: Foundations / Phys 250 - Special Topics Astrophysics
• translation: a special topics graduate course that is listed both in Computer Science and in Physics
• units: 4

Description:

• Introduction to quantum computing with an emphasis on the computer science part of the field.
  Topics that will be covered: elementary quantum mechanics, quantum information, quantum gates and circuits, quantum circuit complexity, teleportation, quantum cryptography, Shor's quantum algorithm for factoring integers and discrete logarithms, Grover's quantum searching algorithm, lower bounds in quantum computation, quantum error correction and fault tolerant quantum computation.

Required Textbook:

• Phillip Kaye, Raymond Laflamme and Michele Mosca, An Introduction to Quantum Computation, Oxford University Press. If you are waiting to buy this book, you might want to print out its first chapter, which is available for free.

Other resources that can be helpful: Michael A. Nielsen and Isaac L. Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information; The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume III; John Preskill's Lecture Notes on Quantum Computation; David Mermin's lecture notes on quantum computation; Course Notes of Umesh Vazirani; Lectures on Quantum Computation by David Deutsch.

Prerequisites:

• I will not assume that you know much about quantum mechanics or theoretical computer science, but I do assume that you want to learn about both fields. You should be mathematically literate as we are going to do a lot of linear algebra over the complex numbers.

Grading/Exams:

• Final score = (1/3) Midterm + (2/3) Final Paper
• The Midterm will be on Wednesday, May 16 (Week 7). The material will be all of Week 1 through Week 6
• The Final Paper is due in Finals Week

Weekly Schedule:

• Monday 10:00-11:50 Class (PHELPS 1401)
• Tuesday 10:00-12:00 Office hours (Harold Frank Hall, 5109)
• Wednesday 10:00-11:50 Class (PHELPS 1401)

Contacting/Questions:

• Any time, any where, I will be happy to talk about quantum computation and things related. For the more boring topics, please use my office hours or email me for an appointment.

Schedule and Slides

• Week 1 [April 2 - April 8]
  Monday: formalities, raison d'être of quantum computation, a brief history of quantum computation, interference phenomenon
  Wednesday: Turing machines, crash course in computational complexity theory, big O notation, probabilistic computation, some probabilistic algorithms, how to correct noisy random coin flips
  Slides of Week 1
  
  
• Week 2 [April 9 - April 15]
  Monday: quantum probability amplitudes, effect of measurements, Dirac's braket notation, quantum information
  Wednesday: allowed transformations, simple quantum gates, polarized light, tensor products, quantum circuits
  Slides of Week 2
  Notes I
  Exercises I / Answers I
  
  
• Week 3 [April 16 - April 22]
  Monday: no class
  Wednesday: no class
  
  
• Week 4 [April 23 - April 29]
  Monday: linear algebra, simple single quantum gates, tensor products, some simple quantum circuits, two qubit gates, multiple Hadamard gates, quantum circuits
  Wednesday: more linear algebra, inner products, Euclidean norms, outer products, Hermitean conjugates, unitarity, reversible classical computation, CCNOT circuits
  Saturday (extra class in PHELPS 1401, 10:00-11:50 am): Modulo 2 algebra, classical universality of CCNOT gates, approximate quantum sates, fidelity, approximate unitaries, universal sets of gates, measurement bases, entanglement, superdense coding
  Slides of Monday, Wednesday Week 4
  Slides of Saturday Week 4
  
  
• Week 5 [April 30 - May 6]
  Monday: entanglement, local versus global transformations, density matrices, EPR pairs, Bell states, superdense coding
  Wednesday: annoucements regarding Midterm and Final paper, potential topics for papers; teleportation of quantum states
  Slides of Monday Week 5
  Slides of Wednesday Week 5
  Exercises II / Answers II
  
  
• Week 6 [May 7 - May 13]
  Monday: query complexity, black box problems, Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm
  Wednesday: Simon's problem, phase-kickback trick, Simon's quantum algorithm, classical lower bound for Simon's problem, classical complexity of primality testing and factorization, quantum Fourier transformation
  Slides of Monday, Wednesday Week 6
  
  
• Week 7 [May 14 - May 20]
  Monday: quantum Fourier transform', quantum algorithm for period finding, Shor's factoring algorithm
  Slides Monday, Week 7
  Wednesday: Midterm on material of Weeks 1 through 6.
  Slides Week 1-6 (pdf|ppt)
  
  
• Week 8 [May 21 - May 27]
  Monday: mod N calculations, factoring using period finding, discrete logarithms modulo N, discrete logarithms of elliptic curves
  Wednesday: Hidden Subgroup Problem, graph automorphism problem, computational complexity classes, P, NP, PSPACE, BPP, BQP
  Slides Monday, Wednesday Week 8
  
  
• Week 9 [May 28 - June 3]
  Monday: no class (Memorial Day)
  Wednesday: interactive proofs for Graph Isomorphism, quantum searching, Grover's quadratic speed-up
  Slides Wednesday Week 9
  
  
• Week 10 [June 4 - June 10]
  Monday: lower bound on quantum searching, the polynomial method for general query complexity problems
  Wednesday: polynomial versus exponential speed ups, state of the art quantum algorithms, lattice problems, quantum adiabatic optimization, quantum error correction
  Slides Monday, Wednesday Week 10
  
  

	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Created March 21, 2007 / last updated June 6, 2007 by vandam@cs