Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

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I will discuss the notions of qubits and qudits in quantum computation and quantum information theory, and I will introduce the notion of hybrid quantum memory, a mutual generalization of qubits and classical bits. In short, a hybrid quantum memory unit is a finite-dimensional C^*-algebra, or a direct sum of matrix algebras. Finally I will compute when one hybrid quantum memory is better than another in the bulk limit, assuming equal memory performance. The answer involves bin packing and the Cramer-Chernoff tail estimate, borrowed from probability theory.