The following articles are taken from the mainstream media and popular scientific press. The list reflects the growing interest and press which the field has received. Most of these are short news items. However, the article by Chuang and Gershenfeld, "Quantum computing with molecules," provides a good introduction to quantum computation and use of NMR for demonstrating small quantum computers.
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There are a number of distinct areas within the general field of quantum information such as quantum computation, quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation and quantum error correction. Although the links between these subfields are not entirely clear they all depend on the use of key features of quantum mechanics and have similar flavors. The articles in this section cover the field quite generally and at most assume a limited knowledge of quantum mechanics. Unfortunately most of the Physics Today articles are not available on line.
The series of articles in the March 1998 Physics World provides a good broad introduction to many of the aspects of quantum information.
Bennett's introductory article, "Quantum information and computation," provides a good overview of the field, in the style of Physics Today articles. It includes brief descriptions of the key concepts used in quantum data compression, teleportation and superdense coding, quantum computation, error correction and experimental possibilities. Discussions are typically conceptual although some mathematics associated with quantum mechanics appears.
The following articles are introductory or survey articles on quantum computation. Typically the audience is assumed to have some familiarity with linear algebra as well as some of the ideas of non-relativistic quantum mechanics.
The excellent survey by Steane, "Quantum computing," written during the first boom in interest in the field, is one of the most comprehensive to appear in journal format. The article covers the key concepts of classical and quantum information and computation. It also discusses some proposals for experimental quantum information processing although in some of these areas there has been substantial progress since the date of publication.
Barenco's article "Quantum physics and computers," is considerably shorter and concentrates mostly on quantum information and computation. It provides a quicker introduction to the main ideas than Steane's article at the expense of including many of the details of classical information theory. The factorization algorithm is described in moderate detail although it does not include the search algorithm, which appeared later. There is also little discussion of experimental proposals. Unfortunately it is unavailable online.
Vedral and Plenio's article, "Basics of quantum computation," also dispenses with extensive discussions of classical information theory. It does cover a wide range of topics in quantum computation including gates, Deutsch's algorithm, the factorization algorithm, error correction and ion trap quantum computers.
Steane's 1998 article offers a good review of the scope and history of quantum error correction.
The first quantum error correction codes were discovered by Shor (1995) and Steane (1996). The general theory and properties of quantum error correction codes were first described by Knill and Laflamme (1997) and Bennett, et.al. (1996).
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