Quantum information science is an area of study based on the idea that information science depends on quantum effects in physics. It includes theoretical issues in computational models as well as more experimental topics in quantum physics including what can and cannot be done with quantum information. The term quantum information theory is sometimes used, but it fails to encompass experimental research in the area.
Subfields include:
- Quantum computing, which deals on the one hand with the question how and whether one can build a quantum computer and on the other hand, algorithms that harness its power (see quantum algorithm)
- Quantum complexity theory
- Quantum cryptography and its generalization, quantum communication
- Quantum error correction
- Quantum communication complexity
- Quantum entanglement, as seen from an information-theoretic point of view
- Quantum dense coding
- Quantum teleportation is one well-known quantum information processing operation which reliably transfers an unknown quantum state from one point to another distant point, destroying the original state in the process.
Famous quotes containing the words quantum, information and/or science:
“But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars:
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer,
For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)