Tzu-Chieh Wei
University of British Columbia
The emerging field of quantum information aims to explore and harness the power of quantum mechanics to perform efficient processing of information, such as computation and communication. The performance can potentially far exceed that by systems obeying the laws of classical physics. Many quantum information processing tasks specifically rely on the quantum nature of the machine that is executing them, usually through the essentially quantum-mechanical feature of entanglement -- a notion that Schroedinger called "the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics".
I shall describe our program of synthesizing entangled quantum states of small numbers of photons, and show how these states can be used to implement basic protocols in quantum information processing. I shall then turn to the issue of quantifying entanglement, adressing the question "How much entanglement do I have?" first for small quantum systems and then for large ones. To conclude, I shall discuss some tantalizing connections with condensed matter at low temperatures, examining what entanglement can tell us about quantum phase transitions.
Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 4:00 PM
Room F235, Technological Institute
Refreshments are served at 3:30 PM
