Quantum Information with Continuous Variables

Book excerpt: Quantum information may sound like science fiction but is, in fact, an active and extremely promising area of research, with a big dream: to build a quantum computer capable of solving problems that a classical computer could not even begin to handle. Research in quantum information science is now at an advanced enough stage for this dream to be credible and well-worth pursuing. It is, at the same time, too early to predict how quantum computers will be built, and what potential technologies will eventually strike gold in their ability to manipulate and process quantum information. One direction that has reaped many successes in quantum information processing relies on continuous variables. This area is bustling with theoretical and experimental achievements, from continuous-variable teleportation, to in-principle demonstrations of universal computation and efficient error correction. Now the time has come to compile some of the major results into one volume. In this book the leading researchers of the field present up-to-date developments of continuous-variable quantum information. This book is organized to suit many reader levels with introductions to every topic and in-depth discussions of theoretical and experimental results.