Quantum Computing and the Feynman Festival

Abstract

The Feynman Festival is a new interdisciplinary conference developed for studying Richard Feynman and his physics. The first meeting of this new conference series was held at the University of Maryland on 23--28 August 2002 (http://www.physics.umd.edu/robot/feynman.html) and the second meeting is scheduled for August 2004 at the same venue. According to Feynman, the different aspects of nature are different aspects of the same thing. Therefore, the ultimate purpose of the conference is to find Feynman's same thing from all different theories. For this reason, the first meeting of the Festival did not begin with a fixed formula, but composed its scientific programme based on responses from the entire physics community. The conference drew the most enthusiastic response from the community of quantum computing, the field initiated by Feynman. Encouraged by the response, we decided to edit a special issue of Journal of Optics B: Quantum and Semiclassical Optics on quantum computing in connection with the first Feynman Festival. The authorship is not restricted to the participants of the Feynman Festival, and all interested parties were encouraged to submit their papers on this subject. Needless to say, all the papers were peer reviewed according to the well-established standards of the journal. The subject of quantum computing is not restricted to building and operating computers. It requires a deeper understanding of how quantum mechanics works in materials as well as in our minds. Indeed, it covers the basic foundations of quantum mechanics, measurement theory, information theory, quantum optics, atomic physics and condensed matter physics. It may be necessary to develop new mathematical tools to accommodate the language that nature speaks. It is gratifying to note that this special issue contains papers covering all these aspects of quantum computing. As Feynman noted, we could be discussing these diversified issues to study one problem. In our case, this `one problem' is to build quantum computers.