Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Quantum superposition is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics that states that linear combinations of solutions to the Schrödinger equation are also solutions of the Schrödinger equation. This follows from the fact that the Schrödinger equation is a linear differential equation in time and position.
Quantum parallelism is the heuristic that quantum computers can be thought of as evaluating a function for multiple input values simultaneously. This can be achieved by preparing a quantum system in a superposition of input states and applying a unitary transformation that encodes the function to be evaluated.
Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory that describes the behavior of nature at and below the scale of atoms. [2]: 1.1 It is the foundation of all quantum physics, which includes quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science. Quantum mechanics can describe many systems that classical physics cannot.
A primary approach to computing the behavior of a wave function is to write it as a superposition (called "quantum superposition") of (possibly infinitely many) other wave functions of a certain type—stationary states whose behavior is particularly simple. Since the Schrödinger equation is linear, the behavior of the original wave function ...
A quantum walk is the quantum analogue of a classical random walk. A classical random walk can be described by a probability distribution over some states, while a quantum walk can be described by a quantum superposition over states. Quantum walks are known to give exponential speedups for some black-box problems.
One example of superposition is the double-slit experiment, in which superposition leads to quantum interference. Another example of the importance of relative phase is Rabi oscillations, where the relative phase of two states varies in time due to the Schrödinger equation. The resulting superposition ends up oscillating back and forth between ...
An inherent advantage yielded by quantum cryptography when compared to classical cryptography is the detection of passive eavesdropping. This is a natural result of the behavior of quantum bits; due to the observer effect, if a bit in a superposition state were to be observed, the superposition state would collapse into an eigenstate. Because ...
To further illustrate, Schrödinger described how one could, in principle, create a superposition in a large-scale system by making it dependent on a quantum particle that was in a superposition. He proposed a scenario with a cat in a closed steel chamber, wherein the cat's life or death depended on the state of a radioactive atom, whether it ...