Doing More with Quantum Phases of Spin Chains
October 13, 2015
Jacob Miller and Akimasa Miyake have recently published a paper in Physical Review Letters showing that a particular class of one-dimensional spin chains, belonging to a type of quantum phase, are uniformly useful for certain quantum information processing tasks. Our work takes place in the context of measurement-based quantum computation, a means of using entangled many-body systems to perform quantum computation requiring only measurements on individual spins. One advantage of this formalism is that it lets us make interesting connections between quantum information science, which deals with concepts like entanglement and quantum computation, and condensed matter physics, which is concerned with emergent phenomena and phases of matter.