3.1. Qubits, entanglement, Bloch sphere, Pauli matrices
The concepts presented in this section are a specific application of the five postulates of quantum mechanics that were presented in Chapter 2, Postulates of Quantum Mechanics.
In this section, we describe the following in detail:
- Section 3.1.1, Qubits
- Section 3.1.2, Tensor ordering of qubits
- Section 3.1.3, Quantum entanglement
- Section 3.1.4, Bloch sphere
- Section 3.1.5, Displaying the Bloch vector corresponding to a state vector
- Section 3.1.6, Pauli matrices
3.1.1. Qubits
In this section, we describe the current setup for quantum computation and the definition of a qubit. A qubit is a unit of information that represents a two-level quantum system and lives in a two-dimensional Hilbert space . The basis vectors of the quantum space are denoted as , which are referred to as the computational basis states:
A general single-qubit state is described by a superposition of the computational...