5963 The Entanglement Frontier

Saturday, February 18, 2012: 8:30 AM
Room 118 (VCC West Building)
John Preskill , California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA
Information encoded in quantum systems is different than information expressed in terms of ordinary classical bits. For example, if you read ten pages of an ordinary hundred-page book, you learn about 10% of the content of the book. But if you read ten pages of a hundred-page quantum book, you learn almost nothing about the content of the book. That's because nearly all the information in a quantum book is encoded in the correlations among the pages; you can't access it if you read the book one page at a time. This unusual feature of quantum information is called "quantum entanglement," and it is the reason we expect large-scale quantum computers to be more powerful than ordinary digital computers. I will discuss why the quest for precisely controllable highly entangled quantum systems is important, and also why it is very difficult.
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