Teaching plan

Below is a teaching plan for which topics will be covered in which lectures, and some details about the lecture content. Changes in the teaching plan may occur during the semester.?

The chapter numbers refer to which chapters in Mike & Ike that cover the lecture content. It does not mean that a given week's lectures will necessarily cover all of the material in the stated chapters. E.g., chapter 2.2 is large, and we will cover various parts of it during different weeks.?

WeekNotesTopicChs.Details
4?Math fundamentals2.1Course goals, brief history, vector space, bases, operators, matrices, eigenvalues, spectral decomposition, operator functions, types of operators (normal, unitary, Hermitian, positive, projectors).?
5?States, qubits, entanglement + classical gates1, 2.1, 3.1Polar decomposition, trace, commutators, postulates about states and evolution, qubits, global vs. relative phase, Bloch sphere, several qubits, computational basis, Bell states, entanglement, relation between wave functions and vectors, classical gates, reversible classical computation
6No lecture MondaySimple quantum gates + measurement postulates1, 2.2Single-qubit gates, projective measurements, Born rule, state update, expectation values, observables
7?Circuit basics + teleportation, superdense coding1, 2.3Quantum circuit model, wires, gates, controlled gates, no-cloning theorem, teleportation, superdense coding, no signaling, resource accounting
8?Density matrices2.4, 2.5Mixtures, density operators, Bloch sphere, non-uniqueness of ensemble decomposition, reduced density operators, partial trace, Schmidt decomposition, purification, postulates for density operators
9?Generalized measurements + circuits2.2, 4.1-4.4General measurement operators, POVMs, Naimark dilation, ancillas, state discrimination, circuit principles
10?Computing, algorithms, Grover3, 5.1, 6.1Universality, oracle model, Deutsch-Jozsa, overview of algorithms, Grover's algorithm
11MidtermChannels 1: Kraus operators, environment8.1, 8.2CPTP maps, Kraus operator representation, non-uniqueness of Kraus representation, environment, Stinespring dilation
12?Channels 2: Noise examples8.3Examples of standard noise channels, erasure channel, effect on Bloch vectors
13?Distance measures9Trace distance, fidelity, monotonicity/contractivity, relation to measurements, relationship between measures, Uhlmann's theorem
14Easter (no teaching)???
15Easter (no teaching)???
16?Noise, error correction, hardware7.1-7.2, 10.1-10.2Noise, bit-flip, phase-flip, Shor code, syndromes, hardware principles, DiVincenzo's criteria
17?Entropy and information 1: Classical, von Neumann11.1, 11.2, 11.3Classical entropy, joint-system classical entropy, classical mutual information, von Neumann entropy
18?Entropy and information 2: Joint-system quantum, Holevo11.2, 11.3, 12.1Joint-system quantum entropy, Holevo information, Holevo bound
19?Bell's inequality and nonlocality2.6CHSH inequality, nonlocality, Tsirelson bound
20?Quantum cryptography12.6QKD, third-party entanglement, BB84, device-independent cryptography
21?Review??
22Exam???
Published Jan. 13, 2026 11:42 PM - Last modified Jan. 24, 2026 10:34 PM