Practicality of Quantum Information Processing

Quantum Information Processing (QIP) is expected to bring revolutionary enhancement to various technological areas. However, today's QIP applications are far from being practical. The problem involves both hardware issues, i.e., quantum devices are imperfect, and software issues, i.e., the functionality of some QIP applications is not fully understood.Aiming to improve the practicality of QIP, in my PhD research I have studied various topics in quantum cryptography and ion trap quantum computation. In quantum cryptography, I first studied the security of position-based quantum cryptography (PBQC). I discovered a wrong assumption in the previous literature that the cheaters are not allowed to share entangled resources. I proposed entanglement attacks that could cheat all known PBQC protocols.I also studied the practicality of continuous-variable (CV) quantum secret sharing (QSS). While the security of CV QSS was considered by the literature only in the limit of infinite squeezing, I found that finitely squeezed CV resources could also provide finite secret sharing rate. Our work relaxes the stringent resources requirement of implementing QSS.In ion trap quantum computation, I studied the phase error of quantum information induced by dc Stark effect during ion transportation. I found an optimized ion trajectory for which the phase error is the minimum. I also defined a threshold speed, above which ion transportation would induce significant error.In addition, I proposed a new application for ion trap systems as universal bosonic simulators (UBS). I introduced two architectures, and discussed their respective strength and weakness. I illustrated the implementations of bosonic state initialization, transformation, and measurement by applying radiation fields or by varying the trap potential. When comparing with conducting optical experiments, the ion trap UBS is advantageous in higher state initialization efficiency and higher measurement accuracy.Finally, I proposed a new method to re-cool ion qubits during quantum computation. The idea is to transfer the motional excitation of a qubit to another ion that is prepared in the motional ground state. I showed that my method could be ten times faster than current laser cooling techniques, and thus could improve the speed of ion trap quantum computation.Ph.D