2002/04/25 by Cesar Miquel, Juan Pablo Paz, Marcos Saraceno
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.65.062309
16 pages, 7 figures, to appear in Phys Rev A
arxiv created 2002/04/25 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
We represent both the states and the evolution of a quantum computer in phase space using the discrete Wigner function. We study properties of the phase space representation of quantum algorithms: apart from analyzing important examples, such as the Fourier Transform and Grover's search, we examine the conditions for the existence of a direct correspondence between quantum and classical evolutions in phase space. Finally, we describe how to directly measure the Wigner function in a given phase space point by means of a tomographic method that, itself, can be interpreted as a simple quantum algorithm.