Description

The aim of this project is to explore some of the consequences of quantum mechanics and ways in which it is fundamentally different from classical mechanics, in particular due to superposition of states and the process of measurement.

There are many specific topics you can investigate. Applications include quantum computers, teleportation and quantum cryptography, and some progress is being made in actually implementing such ideas.

For example, the fact that measurement alters a quantum state means that in principle it is possible to transmit information in such a way that no third party can listen in without being detected.

Quantum computers process quantum information and can, in principle, perform certain types of calculation much more efficiently than classical computers. A well-known example is the problem of factorising a product of two large prime numbers. The classical difficulty of this problem is the basis for the widely-used RSA encryption scheme, used e.g. for secure transmission over the internet. However, there are many very difficult challenges to constructing a practical quantum computer.

Prerequisites

Quantum Mechanics III or equivalent.

Resources

Good places to start are Quantiki, Qubit and of course Wikipedia. There are also excellent notes by John Preskill and useful links at his Quantum Computation webpage.