Third-Year & Honours Physics

Outline of the course

1.    Historical development of computational tools 

2.    Conventional computers

• Universal Turing machine
• Binary system
• Boolean algebra and logic gates
• Physical implementation (circuits, transistors)

3.    Quantum electronic devices

• Semiconductors and heterostructures
• Crystal structure and potential
• Kronig-Penney model and band theory
• Effective mass approximation
• Density of states
• Quantum wells, wires, and dots
• Solutions to Schrodinger's equation

4.    Quantum computation

• Quantum bits
• Quantum logic gates
• Quantum parallelism
• Quantum algorithm
• Physical implementation

5.    Quantum information

• Quantum cryptograph
• Quantum bit commitment
• Quantum teleportation
• Quantum games

Lecturer