CS 264
Quantum Computation
Fall 2009


Instructor

Sandy Irani
4042 Bren Hall
irani@ics.uci.edu

Class Times and Place

T-Th 11:00AM-12:30PM
Bren Hall 1423
No class: Oct 15, 22, 27
Extra lecture: Tue, Dec 8, 10:30-12:30pm

Course Overview

This course will provide an introduction to the field of quantum computation with an emphasis on computational complexity. Below is a list of some of the topics that will be covered: Depending on time, I may give a couple overview lectures on important areas in quantum computation which we will not have time to cover in detail. Topics will hopefully include error correction and fault-tolerant computation as well as quantum cryptography.

Prerequisites

No formal course requirements. Students with a strong background in either computer science, mathematics, physics or chemstry are welcome to attend.

Course Requirements

Problem sets will be given every two weeks. Students are also expected to provide typed and formatted scribe notes for two or three lectures which will be posted on the course web page. Students may elect to do a project in lieu of the last problem set. This could be a paper (original work or survey paper) or a presentation in class.

Reading list

There is no required text for the course. The following is a list of books and course notes that may be useful. At the beginning of each lecture, I will point to recommended references for the material to be presented.

Lecture Topics

Date Topic
Sep 24 Quantum Mechanics Postulates, Qubits
Sep 29 Observables, Hamiltonian, Schrodinger's Eqn
Oct 1 Tensor products, Entanglement, Bell Inequalities
Oct 6 Quantum circuits, Universal gate sets
Oct 8 Quantum Complexity Classes, QFT over Z_2^N Deutsch-Jozsa
Oct 13 BQP in PSPACE, Simon's Algorithm
Oct 20 QFT over Z_N, Factoring reduces to Order Finding
Oct 29 Shor's Factoring Algorithm
Nov 3 Factoring Recap, Hidden Subgroup Problem
Nov 5 Phase Estimation, Discrete Log
Nov 10 Lower Bound for Unstructured Search
Nov 12 Grover Search, Quantum Simulation
Nov 17 Search by Quantum Walk
Nov 19 Quantum Hitting Time
Nov 24 Quantum Walk Algorithm for Search and Element Distinctness
Dec 1 Adiabatic Quantum Computation
Dec 3 QMA-completeness
Dec 8 Error Correcting Codes