Studies in quantum computation and information

Quantum computing is a fast emerging field with diversified potential applications including those in aerospace and defense. Besides high speed computing that would put the fastest of contemporary supercomputers in shade, other applications pertain to virtually foolproof quantum encryption for security, and even teleportation. The phenomenon of teleportation has been recently demonstrated in a primitive form.13; In this report, a literature survey is carried out from a theoretical perspective. Study includes the fundamentals of quantum computation and information. Quantum entanglement, which is at the heart of many interesting applications like teleportation and quantum dense coding, is also explained; this is followed by the Shor's quantum factorization algorithm. Also discussed is the process of quantum measurement and decoherence problem. Finally single qubit operations are explained using Bloch sphere representation, which provide excellent visual appreciation of various qubit operations