Introduction

Quantum theory has always been one of the most successful as well as the most mysterious of

all scientific theories. In the decades following the 1920s, physicists had great success in

applying quantum mechanics to understand the fundamental particles and forces of nature

and also some other areas of physics. But it is only in 1970s and 1980s, when a few pioneers

were inspired to apply the laws of quantum mechanics in the information theory and also to

the realm of communication. Russian mathematician Yuri Manin proposed the idea. In 1980,

Richard Feynman along with others began to investigate the generalization of conventional

information science concepts to quantum physical processes, considering the representation

of binary numbers in relation to the quantum states of two-state quantum systems. In the

celebrated paper of 1982, Feynman pointed out that there seemed to be essential difficulties

in simulating quantum mechanical systems on classical computers and urged to build

computers based on the principles of quantum mechanics. In 1985, David Deutsch published

a theoretical paper describing a universal quantum computer, proving that if two-state system

could be made to evolve by means of a set of simple operations, any such evolution could be

produced, and made to simulate any physical system; these operations would be called

quantum gates, as they act as binary logic gates in classical computers. In the 1990s several

teams of researchers began to exploit this idea, showing that it is indeed possible to use

quantum computers to efficiently simulate systems that have no known efficient simulation

on a classical computer. Deutsch suggested that quantum computers might have

computational powers exceeding those of classical computers as they can efficiently solve

computational problems which have no efficient solution on a classical computer, even on a

probabilistic Turing machine. This remarkable first step taken by Deutsch was improved in

the subsequent decade by many people. Applying Peter Shor’s algorithm, the problem of
finding the prime factors of an integer and the discrete logarithm problem could be solved

efficiently on a quantum computer. This attracted widespread interest because these two

problems are widely believed to have no efficient solution on a classical computer. Shor’s

results are a powerful indication that quantum computers are more powerful than

probabilistic Turing machines. Though at present times, a quantum computer is mostly a

theoretical construct, but it is believed to be one of the most exciting development in future

and thus making quantum computation, one of the most promising and active field of

research.

In this project, we attempt to get a brief overview of different aspects and techniques used in

the field of quantum computation and information. In the 1st chapter, we discuss the

fundamental concepts, along with the basic mathematical tools and quantum gates, required

to perform quantum computation. The 2nd chapter describes various kinds of measurement

processes and discusses an alternative formulation using density operator. In the 3rd chapter

we study the property of quantum entanglement and how it is utilised to teleport quantum

states. The last chapter reviews the progress of quantum cryptography, focusing on the

quantum key distribution and other applications.