Thursday, February 14, 2008, 4:00pm
Location: Kerchof 317
Title: Towards Quantum Computing with Graphs and Light
Olivier Pfister (UVa, Physics)
Quantum computing and quantum information have attracted much attention over the past decade because they predict spectacular enhancements of computational performance for historically (if not provably) hard problems such as factoring. Quantum computing has fundamental overlaps with group representation theory, topology, and graph theory, and the physical implementation of nontrivial quantum computing is an exciting, if daunting, challenge to physicists devoted to the experimental study of quantum systems. In this talk, I will introduce an interesting flavor of quantum computing, called one-way quantum computing, which interfaces with mathematical graph theory. I will then outline how the power and elegance of graph quantum states translate into "physical reality" in our experimental setup, next door.
(Refreshments precede the talk at 3:30pm in Kerchof 314)