Quantum State in Large Objects

From the BBC: Team's quantum object is the biggest by factor of billions.

Yet another important development towards physical implementations of quantum computers.

Vedral's New Book

Vlatko Vedral has a new book out titled Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information (Amazon). From the description it looks to be a non-technical exploration, check both the links for more.

I have Vedral's 2006 book, Introduction to Quantum Information Science [1] and consult it from time to time. It went a lot deeper into some areas than I needed while doing my initial work on Cove, but nonetheless remains in my stack of quantum computing books that I consult. See my Top Books on Quantum Computing Post for the books I found most useful.

References
[1] V. Vedral, Introduction to Quantum Information Science, 1 ed. Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 2006.

University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing and Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies

University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing and Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies team up.

$900k NSF Grant for Quantum Computing

In addition to the DARPA funding I mentioned a few weeks ago, the National Science Foundation has recently awarded a $900,000 grant for quantum hardware.

Quantum Mathematica Add On

This was passed my way by the author, José Luis Gómez-Muñoz: a Mathematica Add On for Quantum Computing. There is also a short 6 minute video that walks you through it on youtube:



I have not played with it yet, but the video does a great job of explaining what it can do. What I especially liked was the ability to view the circuit in different forms. As an example you could view the circuit in the more traditional 2 dimensional form as well as a 3 dimensional one. Additionally you can view things in matrix form and so on.

Definitely looks like a great tool to grab images for presentations. Furthermore it would be useful for students to double check work. I had to write my own complex matrix class for Cove and it would've been nice to have an easy to use tool such as this to compare against so I could more quickly verify my implementation.

13th Workshop on Quantum Information Processing Presentations

I came across this on Dave Bacon's blog last week: the presentations from the 13th Workshop on Quantum Information Processing (QIP 2010). If you're interested in the field, you're sure to find something of interest to check out.

An Invisible Quantum Tripwire

I came across this paper on arXiv today: An Invisible Quantum Tripwire. It is a short read (4) pages, and pretty interesting. It basically expands the bomb experiment, where the presence of a bomb can be detected without measurement- albeit with only a 25% chance of successful detection. (That cannot be done classically.) The paper also introduces that experiment.