1 Introduction
“Information is physical” claimed the physicist Rolf Landauer,1 writing
[Information processing] is inevitably done with real physical degrees of freedom, obeying the laws of physics, and using parts available in our actual physical universe. How does that restrict the process?
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The field of quantum information theory is concerned with what sorts of information processing tasks can and cannot be performed if the underlying information carriers are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics as opposed to classical mechanics. For example, we might use the spin of a single electron to store information, rather than the magnetization of a small region of magnetic material as in a hard disk drive or even ink marks on a ...
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