Physicist: I’ve been a little busy to post much here for a while, but you may be interested in what I’m working on, so here it is. I’m teaching an introductory course on quantum information and computation, and the primary material for the course are these lecture notes. I’ll post more as they exist more.
This is funny in context.
If you’re interested and are familiar with (or willing to learn) linear algebra, then take a look.
Lecture 3: Operators and Eigenstates
This is a worthy endeavor. Eventually you will have an editor but let me give you a couple freebies. At the top of page 4, you mention an “approximately sinc [sic] squared” function; I assume you meant “sine squared”.
On page 6, there are two grammatical errors in the following sentence:“ We call ∣ψ⟩ a “normalized” state when the sum of the magnitude squared of it’s coeffi-
cients is one.” I’ll leave it as an exercise to find them.
That’s some pretty nice notes. I can definitely tell it’s the Physicist’s perspective, given all the historical experiments that are described. Very well done. The audience is grad students, right? Or advanced physics undergrads?
Here is an excerpt from my book that covers some of the introductory topics like bras and kets from a computer science perspective: https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSLA_quantum_chapter.pdf#page=8
It relies heavily on the linear algebra formalism, and using analogies for measurements involving polarizing lenses like:
SELECT photon FROM photons WHERE tag=”H”;
Feel free to share with your students in case they need some additional reading on the basic definitions.
@Ivan Savov
Thank you very much!
The target audience is undergrads who paid attention in linear algebra enough to know how to find eigenvalues. The big challenge of the class (I hope) is getting used to the notation and keeping track of what you’re talking about.
@Stephan Heumann
Thanks!
Amazing work, keep it up please! I love reading your posts. I was in a mixed Computer Science – Mathematics high school, then lost a bit touch with Maths in college but now catching up for fun :). Wish you would post more on Mathematics if possible, you have great teaching skills especially in Maths
I’m loving that Alice -> Bob graphic.
In lesson 1, problem 3, I’m having a hard time seeing how the bomb could be detected without blowing it up.
If I understand the lesson correctly, the first beam splitter sends the photons down either path with 50/50 probability. So no matter what happens after that, there is always a 50/50 chance that a photon will hit the bomb and blow it up.
Unless I misunderstood something, and that the second beam splitter somehow “interferes” with the first? But that would mean that, despite light going really fast, the future interaction would still somehow interfere with itself in the past. But I thought that photons (or whatever other quanta we are talking about) could only be in two (or more) places at once, not times?
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