Reading Week 1 - Quantum Cryptography, Computation, Teleportation; Review of Wave Functions and Young's Slit Experiment
Spiller Paper
You can read the whole thing via [[1 Quantum Information Processing Cryptography Computation Teleportation IEEE85 1996 Spiller with reading assignments.pdf]]. A cliff notes version follows:
Introduction
This paper talks about uses of quantum computing, in the sense of:
- Cryptography
- Computation
- Teleportation
We used to use QM to study large systems of particles, but now we use QM on a small group of individual electrons. For example, trapped ion is this method, trapping single atoms (ions) that can be probed with magnetic fields. This allows quantum information technology, where QM dictates how information is stored. It outperforms classical computers in very specific areas, making it useful to study. We'll cover:
- Quantum Cryptography: sharing quantum systems allows for a shared random bit string to represent a key that only those communicating on the line can know, and thus helps in encryption.
- Quantum Computation: Qubits exist in a superposition between 0 and 1, allowing for multiple inputs states to be computed against in parallel.
- Quantum Teleportation: Using classical bits, we can transfer an unknown quantum state through a hostile environment, where quantum computers would have a more fragile existence.
Quantum Cryptography
The Idea
We want to exchange a message between two individuals, without a possible interceptor being able to know what message we sent.
A popular encryption method is via public key cryptosystems, where details of the encryption are agreed upon by both parties first. A common one is RSA (named after Ronals Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman) which use the difficulty of factorizing large composite integers to make them work. But they are still potentially insecure. It's just inefficient for a classical computer to tackle doing the factorization.
Even if the key is changed every time, akin to a Verman cipher, we don't know if Eve (the interceptor) didn't intercept the key itself.
However, a quantum system is irreversible, so if the key is distributed, then Eve can only determine the key while tampering the system (ie: observing the key forces the system to change state, indicating the presence of the listener).
Alice and Bob share a quantum channel and a public channel. Photons are sent down the quantum channel, and are what Eve wants to try to intercept, but Even can only really listen to what's on the public channel.
Alice sends photons one by one, in states she chooses at random via:
and the diagonal states (/ and \). Bob randomly chooses to measure the rectilinear basis, or the diagonal basis. He records his results and keeps them secret, but let's Alice know the bases he used instead. Alice tells Bob what data to keep, for the vertical and horizontal for the rectilinear basis, or for the diagonal one. They agree that
Errors and Eavesdropping
The problems with RQT are that:
- Errors can occur over time from the environment, flipping the bits on occasion
- Eve trying to listen in will cause errors themselves. This corrupts a quarter of the bits she intercepts since on average, half of her bits to Bob are wrong, and half are wrong to Alice.
So we try to solve these issues. They have to build in error correction in the data they send, and also know that if Eve is eavesdropping then she will know some of the correct bits. But they can have systems in place to deal with both of these. The former comes from classical computing, using codes within the message itself to correct it.
Eve's expected information about the key can be reduced to an exponentially small fraction, knowing exactly one bit of it.
Alice and bob can estimate errors in the RQT by public comparison. If the error rate is greater than 25%, then they can suspect that Eve was listening in and thus bin the transmission. But they know that they should do this, which is the big thing here. This is the key distillation procedure.
For error correction, they can do bisective parity checks similar to Hamming Codes (more on them via this awesome video) . These work by taking the number of 0's and 1's in certain "slots" (modulo 2, 3, 4, ...) and determining if there's an even parity (0) or odd parity (1), and appending that to the message. This takes a
After removing the errors, Alice and Bob decrease Eve's knowledge via privacy amplification. From the RQT error rate, Eve's information can be estimated as follows. If Alice and Bob agree on a random subset of bit positions in the corrected RQT, then Eve will only know the parity of that subset if she knows the values of all the bits it contains, which is extremely unlikely. Thus, they use this parity bit as the first bit in a new secret final key. Choosing subsets approximately equal to the corrected RQT minus the number of bits they think Eve knows, they get a number of shared bits, and thus the final perfect secret key. It essentially mixes up what Eve knows with what she doesn't, diluting her knowledge.
As an example, having 4% RQT arrows, Alice and Bob distill 2000 bits down to 754, where Eve will know less than
Quantum Computation
In Turing's model of a Universal Turning Machine (the generalization of a classical computer), a program must possibly be an infinite tape, and a head must read these values and execute based on their values. It must also be able to store values via internal memory. This machine can execute any algorithm, and thus is modellable on a classical computer.
Conventional operations like AND and OR are irreversible; any given output like
To avoid this, you must have the same number of inputs as outputs to avoid losing information. An example of a quantum gate is the controlled-NOT (ie: XOR) denoted
For example,
Consider calculating a function
Here, one of the
An interesting thing is that even though we know that all classical systems that we know are essentially universal turning machines (UTM), it is still an open problem considering if a built quantum computer is equivalent to the Universal Quantum Computer (UQC), where states are not definite and are in fact possibly infinite in variation.
Similar to classical computing, it's believed we build a UQC from a set of quantum gates. We care about reversible gates of similar classical gates since these new gates are the building blocks of quantum machines. XOR can act on a superposition of both the
The nice thing here is that XOR is now reversible, helping to disentangle states:
But we must do more. We require that the effects of the environment be small enough so that the whole computer evolves in reversible Schrodinger fashion. This is a hard ask! But for the moment, assume their achievable. Consider the
where
giving an entanglement of the input
Probable Uses
Note that computing
So what are they good for? In essence, a classical computer, if it had to check all
Quantum Teleportation
QT relies on Alice and Bob sharing and storing EPR pairs of quantum systems.
Teleportation
A customer gives Alice a system of a single qubit in an arbitrary quantum state. Bob can reproduce the same system some distance away, requiring only classical data to do so. Note that Alice cannot send some measurement on the system to Bob, since the state has to be known to be one of a given basis set. This is because measuring the observed state, referring to some basis, will give needed
In layman's Alice is unable to infer the state of the system she's given. Measuring the state internally destroys the state! But we can use EPR pairs to get around this problem.
Suppose Alice has qubit one of a pair and Bob has qubit two. The unknown state of the customer's qubit three is represented as
Alice measures qubits one and three using the XOR process described in Reading Week 1 - Quantum Cryptography, Computation, Teleportation; Review of Wave Functions and Young's Slit Experiment#^51ee9a through Reading Week 1 - Quantum Cryptography, Computation, Teleportation; Review of Wave Functions and Young's Slit Experiment#^5b388a.
1.5.3: Young's Double-Slit Experiment
Consider a sandblaster gun can randomly fire sand particles at an assembly with two slits. We can close or open slits 1 and 2.
Running the experiment with a closed slit 2, the particles pass through Sl. 1 and pile up in a wave-like pattern, which we represent as
If we close Sl. 1 and open Sl. 2, we get
If we open both slits and rerun, the particles can either enter Sl. 1 or 2. The probability
Now if we replace the sandblaster with an electron gun, we expect a similar behavior, expecting the following:
But we get:
If electrons are a wave, then we expect wave interference, where we'll get constructive interference at the light fringes, and destructive interference at the dark ones. Even if we do the experiment and release one electron at a time, to make sure that electron collisions don't happen on the other side of the slit, we get the wave-like pattern.
This implies that the electron must somehow pass through both slits and interfere with itself on the other side, which can only happen if the electron acts as a wave.
So if
where
1.6: Wavefunctions and Probability Amplitudes
We (hopefully) know that electric fields
where
Namely, the thing is that higher energy density correlates to a higher probability of finding a photon. Hence, the probability of finding the photon is proportional to the square of the fields, as given by the equations.
In that light, we define wavefunctions/probability amplitude
But if we square that we get:
Namely, the height at any point on the square graph is proportional to the probability of finding the electron at that point.
Hence, if we want to know the probability of finding the particle in range
and the probability of finding the particle anywhere should be 1:
In general, to make the
where
We know that
But notice that
where
The above equation can be rewritten as the following momentum eigenfunction via the Schrodinger Equation:
The probability is still:
2.2: Complex Numbers
There's a lot of complex number math that I'm familiar with, but here's an overview.
- (De Moivre's Theorem)
- (Complex Conjugate)
- (Norm)
2.5: Linear Vector Spaces
Here, we learn all about the \bracket{}
in latex:
A lot of this is review for me, see Chapter 1 - Vector Spaces for more info on what's covered here. In short, we have the following:
- A linear vector space
is a collection of vector that meet the following: (commutativity and closure) - (associative property)
- There's a null or zero vector where
for any - Each vector
has an additive inverse such that
- There's scalar multiplication with distributive properties:
- There's a multiplicative identity 1 where
The scalars belong to some field
A set of these vectors is linearly independent if the following sum only is satisfied by all
Otherwise the vectors are linearly dependent and if we know say
A vector space of
Each
We can add two of these vectors where:
and scaled by some
Inner Product
The inner product takes in two vectors
and is only equal iff (additivity in the first slot) - Additivity in the second slot
- Additivity in both slots
Two vectors are orthogonal if
The norm of a vector
If the norm is 1, then
If a set of basis vectors are normalized and are orthogonal to one another, they are an orthonormal basis.
Assume
Where since all the
This function
We know that
So then:
If we instead have some continuous functions
2.6: Using Dirac's Bra-ket Notation
We've seen writing an abstract vector
The conjugate transpose vector is
So for every ket vector
Here we are assuming that:
at the corresponding
Missed Lecture Slides: Hamiltonian
The evolution of a wave function with time is governed by the time-dependent Schrodinger equation:
Here
In contrast, we have the time-independent Schrodinger equation in 3D:
with
In spherical coordinates it becomes:
![[Physics CPE 345 Quantum Computing Lecture slides Quantum superposition 240408.pdf#page=17]]
The general solution for the wave function in hydrogen is:
Where
As an example, in the ground state of hydrogen we get:
where