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CPMR-IJT, Volume 1, No. 1, December 2011

Quantum Information Technology

Sudeepa Roy Dey* Madhu Chauhan**

ABSTRACT
A new quantum information technology (QIT) could emerge in the future, based on current research in the fields of quantum information processing and communication (QIPC). In contrast to conventional IT, where quantum mechanics plays a support role in improving the building blocks, fundamental quantum phenomena play a central role for QIPC information is stored, processed and communicated according to the laws of quantum physics. This additional freedom could enable future QIT to perform to IT tasks we will never achieve with ordinary IT. This paper provides an introduction to QIPC with respect. Keywords: Quantum, QIT, QIPC, Information processing

I. INTRODUCTION
Information technology (IT) can feed off quantum physics in two ways, which might loosely be termed evolutionary and revolutionary. Both are potentially very

important and each one forms a currently very active and exciting research field. In the evolutionary work, quantum physics is essentially employed as a tool, so it is possible to understand and appreciate a good deal of its impact without having to get to grid with the theory itself. Conversely, in the revolutionary work quantum mechanics plays the lead role. Some knowledge of what it is about is therefore required to get a feel for the dramatic new possibilities which arise. The word quantum itself refers to the most fundamental behavior of the smallest particles of matter and energy. Quantum Information Technology is actually concerned with the use of electrons and photons for the transportation and processing of information where the information is encoded upon single photon (the particle of light). In the evolutionary IT work, quantum physics is basically used to better under-stand

*Student (pursuing Mtech.), Amity University, U.P., India **Assistant Professor (IT), Instituete of Innovation in Technology and Management (Affiliated to GGSIP University), New Delhi - 58

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and thus improve existing technology. For example, the development of smaller and faster silicon or other semiconducting devices benefits from the understanding of the quantum behaviour of electrons in such materials. A bit more radical would be the replacement of silicon transistors by superconducting Josephson junction devices. Nevertheless, intrinsically quantum in nature though superconductors may be, this would still not constitute a fundamentally new technology. The superconducting benefits here would be faster digital switching and lower power consumption.

Why Quantum?
Can handle classical computation using quantum computing. Can solve interactable problems like factoring. Can achieve high data rates of classical communication over quantum channels. Much better cryptosystems.

II. MOORES LAW AND BEYOND

Todays world many people are familiar with at least the consequences of Moores Law the fastest computer in the shops doubles in speed about every 18 months to two years. This is because electronic component devices are shrinking. The smaller they get, the faster they work, and the closer they can be packed on a silicon chip. This exponential progress, first noted by Gordon Moore, a co-founder and former CEO of Intel, in 1965, has continued ever since[1]. But it cannot go on forever. Hurdle exist, for example: silicon will hit problems, with oxide thinness, track

width, or whatever new materials or even new paradigms, such as self-assembled nanodevices or molecular electronics, will be needed; lots of dollars will be needed, as Moores second law tells us that fabrication costs are all growing exponentially. However, even if all the hurdles can be overcome, we will eventually run into nature. Very small things do not behave the same way as big ones they begin to reveal their true quantum nature. Following Moores Law, an extrapolation of the exponentially decaying number of electrons per elementary device on a chip gets to one electron per device around 2020. This is clearly too naive but it gives us a hint. Eventually we will get to scales where quantum phenomena rule, whether we like it or not. If we are unable to control these effects, then data bits in memory or processors will suffer errors from quantum fluctuations, and devices will fail. Clearly this alone makes a strong case for investment in research into quantum devices and quantum control. The results should enable us to push Moores Law to the limit, evolving conventional information technology (IT) as far as it can go. Instead of playing support act to make better conventional devices, let quantum mechanics take centre stage in new technology that stores, processes and communicates information according to the laws of quantum mechanics.

III. QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHY

Cryptography is the art of encoding and decoding messages and has existed as long as people have distrusted each other and

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sought forms of secure communication. The purpose of cryptography is to transmit information such that only the intended recipient receives it. The development of quantum cryptography was motivated by the shortcomings of classical cryptographic methods, which can be classified as either public-key or secret-key methods. Quantum cryptography solves the problems of secret-key cryptography by providing a way for two users who are in different locations to securely establish a secret key and to detect if eavesdropping has occurred. In addition, since quantum cryptography does not depend on difficult mathematical problems for its security, it is not threatened by the development of quantum computers. Quantum cryptography accomplishes these remarkable feats by exploiting the properties of microscopic objects such as photons. In 1970 Stephen Wiesner had a realisation that quantum mechanics could be useful for cryptography and in 1984 Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard proposed the well known BB84 scheme for quantum key distribution. Many developments and new protocols have followed. The basic idea is for Alice and Bob to share a secret key and to use this as a one-time-pad to communicate securely quantum mechanics guarantees the security of the key. In BB84 Alice sends to Bob photons chosen randomly from the four states of two overlapping qubit (Quantum bits) bases (e.g. two orthogonal linear polarisations and right and left circular polarizations) and Bob measures in one of

the two bases, chosen at random. After accumulating data, using public communication and sacrificing some of the bits, they can then identify what to keep (the raw key when Bob used the correct basis), locate and correct errors, and scramble and reduce their correct bits (privacy amplification) to distil a shared secret key. Like Bob any eavesdropper (Eve) has to measure the qubits she has to play guess the basis and so cannot avoid introducing errors into the raw key. If Eve reads the lot, Alice and Bob know this and bin the raw key; if Eve reads only a fraction they can use the rest to distil some guaranteed secure bits. The first prototype system ran in 1989. Since then, many developments have taken quantum cryptography out of the laboratory and towards actual technology, using qubits embodied in weak laser pulses or photons, sent from Alice to Bob through standard telecommunications optical fibres or even free space.

IV. QUANTUM COMPUTER

Devices called as Quantum Computer is the upcoming innovation in the field of Quantum Technology which makes use of theories like entanglement and superposition and directly use quantum mechanical phenomena for performing operation data. These systems will be differentiated from traditional systems on the basis of transistors. Considering bit as a physical structure, the system can represent two logical states: true or false i.e 1 or 0. While taking an atom in consideration apart from these two states, the system can be prepared in coherent superposing of two

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states i.e. atom is both in state 0 and state 1. Quantum computers use Qubits instead of bits. A qubit can be considered as an electron particle with three states: spin up (blue) representing 1, spin down (red) representing 0, and quantum states called super-positions that involve spin up and spin down simultane-ously (yellow).

by Grovers algorithm. In this case the advantage is provable. This establishes beyond doubt that (ideal) quantum computers are superior to classical computers for at least one problem.

VI. QUANTUM COMPUTING

Whereas irreversibility is what enables quantum cryptography, it may end up being the insurmountable hurdle for useful quantum computing. Decoherence of any of the qubit components of a quantum computer may trash the running of the whole unitary algorithm. Apart from measurements designed into a quantum computation, which may well be made right at the end, to reveal the result, irreversibility means trouble. If you keep opening the oven door to see what is happening, or the door fits badly so heat leaks to the environment, your souffl will flop. Quantum computing gets its potential power from initial superposition states evolving reversibly and generating entanglement between the many components of quantum machine. The 2m possible states of an m-bit classical register form a suitable basis, so an m-qubit register can be placed in a superposition of all these states. This is why certain problems may be solved \exponentially faster by a quantum machine, in comparison to any classical machine. For a problem whose solution requires some property of the results of all 2m different calculations, these have to be calculated separately in the classical case. On the other

V. THE POWER OF QUANTUM COMPUTING

Integer factorisation is believed to be computationally infeasible with an ordinary computer for large integers that are the product of only a few prime numbers (e.g., products of two 300-digit primes)[6] By comparison, a quantum computer could solve this problem more efficiently than a classical computer using Shors algorithm to find its factors. The only way to increase the security of an algorithm like RSA would be to increase the key size and hope that an adversary does not have the resources to build and use a powerful enough quantum computer. A way out of this dilemma would be to use some kind of quantum cryptography. There are also some digital signature schemes that are believed to be secure against quantum computers. There is one other problem where quantum computers have a smaller, though significant (quadratic) advantage. It is quantum database search, and can be solved

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hand, if some clever manipulation can be performed on a quantum computer state (which has evolved to contain 2 m parts, corresponding to all the classical results), to yield the collective property in just one run, the solution of such a problem can be obtained with exponentially less effort! Below are given a list of things that we can do with the help of quantum computer.

exponentially. A similar square root improvement over classical algorithms for estimating the median of M data can be achieved in the quantum case. Frequency standard: As the first working quantum machines will certainly consist of only a few interacting qubits, it would be nice to find something useful that can be done with such a simple system. A possibility is to use the ideas developed for quantum error correction in something other than a computer. A frequency standard effectively relies on the coherent oscillation of a pure atomic quantum state, so it is limited by decoherence as the atom/ion interacts with its environment. The problem is subtle. It is not simply one of preserving a static state; the oscillation cannot be ignored in a frequency standard! The errors are harder to remove from a time-varying state. Nevertheless, it seems that some entanglement between atoms has potential benefit.

Simulation
A quantum computer would be an excellent basic research tool. It is hard to squash a sizeable Hilbert space into ordinary memory, so simulating complex interacting quantum systems on a conventional computer is really hard work. Simulating them on an actual quantum machine would be much easier! Nuclear physicists, material scientists, molecular chemists and many others would queue up for time on a quantum computer, to investigate novel systems, regimes and materials inaccessible with classical modelling tools.

Experiments
Whereas quantum cryptography relies on the independent behaviour of a string of noninteracting photon qubits, interactions between qubits are a must for quantum computation. There are a number of candidate systems currently being researched. There is no clear favourite as yet, to mirror the use of photons for cryptography. Those jostling for position are: 1. Ions/atoms in an electromagnetic trap, interacting through their quantum

Searching and estimation

A classical search of a random list of M items to and a particular one requires the examination of at least M/2 of them to have a 50% success probability. Lov Grover has shown how a quantum search could find an item in only O(M 1/2 ) steps. Using superposition states enables the examination of multiple items simultaneously. This speeds up the search, although in this case not

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2.

3.

4.

5.

vibrational motion. Their internal energy levels form qubits and external laser fields can be coupled to these. Cavity photon number states and atomic levels (Rydberg or optical) form qubits; external fields (microwave or optical) can be coupled in. Electrons in quantum dots, interacting electrostatically or possibly magnetically. The discrete levels of the confined electrons form qubits and they couple readily to external fields. Spin systems, interacting through their magnetic moments. These might be in a regular lattice, or, at a smaller scale, different spins within a large molecule, the so-called NMR quantum computing. A static external field separates out discrete spin levels for qubits. Time dependent fields can be applied to manipulate the system; in particular, in the NMR case the technology for doing this is very well developed. Superconducting systems, interacting through the quantum motion of electric charges or magnetic flux. Such systems also have discrete levels and can be probed with external currents, voltages and fluxes.

quantum computer. 1. Scalable physically to increase the number of qubits 2. Qubits can be initialized to arbitrary values To summarize the problem from the perspective of an engineer, one needs to solve the challenge of building a system which is isolated from everything except the measurement and manipulation mechanism. Furthermore, one needs to be able to turn off the coupling of the qubits to the measurement so as to not decohere the qubits while performing operations on them. Quantum Decoherence is one major problem is keeping the components of the computer in a coherent state, as the slightest interaction with the external world would cause the system to decohere.

VIII. THE FUTURE / LIMITATIONS

With the growth and development in the field of Quantum Processing, there are many open questions like: What are the functions which a Quantum Computers can do better as compared to classical computers? Like they can search large databases etc. How can large scale Quantum Computers be built? A huge range of small scale quantum computers are built and operated while advances are still required to design large scale systems.

VII. PROBLEMS AND PRACTICALITY ISSUE

There are a number of practical difficulties in building a quantum computer, and thus far quantum computers have only solved trivial problems. David DiVincenzo, of IBM, listed the following requirements for a practical

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In quantum theory the perfect deletion of an unknown state from a collection of two copies is an impossible operation. What are communication channels limitations? Instead of much research work the actual capacity of Quantum communication channel is not revealed. The information bits can be flipped from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0, but an unknown state of a qubit cannot be flipped.

3.

IX. CONCLUSION
Although quantum computing is still in its infancy, experiments have been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of qubits. Research in both theoretical and practical areas continues at a frantic pace, and many national government and military funding agencies support quantum computing research to develop quantum computers for both civilian and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis. 1. Quantum physics has the potential to generate both evolutionary and revolutionary developments in information technology. Expect evolutionary improvements to conventional logical processing to have shorter lead times than those for the emergence of radically new forms of processor. 2. The intrinsic irreversibility of quantum measurement enables guaranteed secure communications. Eavesdroppers cannot intercept quantum transmissions with-out corrupting some of the data, thus exposing themselves. Quantum

4.

5.

6.

cryptosystems use secret keys, shared quantum mechanically, as one-time pads. Quantum cryptosystems work in the real world, not just in sanitized laboratories. The world record key is 20 k bit, established down 23 km of optical fibre under Lake Geneva at 0.5 Hz. Much higher (= 103) bit rates have been achieved in shorter bursts. Quantum systems can exist in superposition states, which simultaneously contain parts corresponding to deferent classical states. A complex quantum machine could thus process an exponentially large number of classical calculations in one run. Problems like factoring would be tractable with quantum parallelization. Some individual quantum gates have been made. Roughly 2000 (plus many more for error correction), coherent as they interact, would be needed to factor a 400 bit number. This is a big challenge for the future. Quantum information technology seems unlikely to displace large areas of existing IT and more likely to emerge alongside it, defining new applications and markets.

Given the might of the current industry, the short term payback will therefore almost certainly come from evolutionary quantumassisted develop-ments. How-ever, given the successes at the basic research level over the last few years, it seems clear that future

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research efforts should be spread across the whole spectrum, rather than simply being focussed on evolutionary short term go.

form http://www.springerlink.com/ content/1570-0755, ISSN=1573-1332 [8] Thomas Beth, Quantum Information Processing, ISBN=3-527-40541-0. [9] Matthies Christandl, Quantum Information Processing, ISBN=158603-611-4 [10] Seth Lloyd, Quantum Information Science, Retrieved from http:// web.mit.edu/2.111/www/notes09/ spring.pdf [11] Scott Aaronson (2008), The limits of quantum, Retrieved from http:// w w w. c s . v i rg i n i a . e d u / ~ r o b i n s / The_Limits_of_Quantum_ Computers.pdf [12] Arun K. Pati, Quantum Information, Computation, and fundamental limitations. [13] Karen Hunter (2002), Quantum Cryptography, Retrieved from http:// w w w. s c i e n c e i n t e g r a t i o n . o r g / Concepts/QuantumCryptography.pdf

X. REFERENCES
[1] K. K. Likharev, Physics World, vol. 10, no. 5, 39 (May 1997). [2] A. Barenco, Contemporary Physics 37, 375 (1996). [3] A. K. Ekert and R. Jozsa, Rev. Mod. Phys. 68, 733 (1996). [4] http://vesta.physics.ucla.edu/ smolin/ index.html, accessed on 9/11/2011 [5] http://www.qubit.org/ mention site is accessed on 10/11/2011 [6] National Science and technology Council (2009), A federal vision for Quantum Information Science, retrieved from http://www.nist.gov/ pml/div684/upload/Federal Vision QIS.pdf [7] Howard E. Brandt, Quantum Information Processing, retrieved