Official description

Special Topics in Quantum Optics: Quantum Measurement

This is a course intended for any students in Quantum Optics or other disciplines who are interested in modern developments in the experimental side of fundamental quantum mechanics, such as (but not limited to) quantum information. It obviously assumes a good working knowledge of quantum mechanics, but new formalism will be introduced as needed, so it should be accessible to first-year as well as second-year graduate students.

Much of the mystery of quantum mechanics has been tied up with the famed "quantum measurement problem" (what is collapse? how/when does it occur? does it occur at all?), but nearly all of us have been trained with a very simplistic view of what quantum measurements really are. It turns out there are many different types of measurement in the real world, and almost never do they correspond to what we get from the QM textbooks. While the textbook treatments long appeared to be a fair simplification of reality, experimental advances in recent years have brought the study of quantum measurement out of the shameful realm of metaphysics and into the lab. Numerous experimental groups now study effects ranging from "interaction-free measurement" to "quantum non-demolition measurements" to "weak measurements" to "generalized quantum measurements" (POVMs), to "quantum cloning" and "quantum teleportation". Ideas about quantum measurement are central to the new fields of quantum cryptography and quantum computation (especially quantum error correction). There are even two distinct paradigms of quantum computation in which the effects of measurement itself are used to carry out operations, in the place of logic gates built from "real" physical interactions.

Piazza signup = piazza.com/utoronto.ca/winter2024/phy2205