[ Last changed: 1st December 1995 ]

Security Group Seminar, 28th November 1995


Speaker:
Artur Ekert, Oxford University

Date:
Tuesday 28th November

Place:
Room TP4, Computer Laboratory

Title:
QUANTUM COMPUTATION: THEORY AND EXPERIMENTS

As computers become faster they must become smaller because of the finiteness of the speed of light. The history of computer technology has involved a sequence of changes from one type of physical realisation to another - from gears to relays to valves to transistors to integrated circuits and so on. Quantum mechanics is already important in the design of microelectronic components. Soon it will be necessary to harness quantum mechanics rather than simply take it into account, and at that point it will be possible to give data processing devices new functionality. Quantum entanglement and quantum interference will make quantum computation so powerful that many problems, which are believed to be intractable on any classical computer, will become efficiently solvable. In order to illustrate the power of quantum data processing a brief discussion of Shor's quantum factoring algorithm will be provided and possibilities of its practical implementation will be discussed.


Oxford Quantum Computation pages
Security Group Seminar, 21st November 1995 / Mark.Lomas@cl.cam.ac.uk