Guidelines for term projects

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The final month of the course you will be working on a term project. Here is some information and guidelines for the project:

Structure:

Your project can be about any topic within quantum computation, quantum information and the broader field of information-oriented quantum physics. You choose a topic yourselves, but it must be approved by the instructor. You should work together preferrably in groups of three, or alternatively two or four if there is a good reason for it.

Format:

The project consists of two parts, a written report and a presentation. You will write a report about your chosen topic, which should be about 5-10 normal typed letter-size pages. Unless every part of your report is written collectively by every member of the group, you should also indicate which group member is primarily responsible for which part of the report. You will also present the results of your project for the other students and the instructors. This should be an oral presentations, preferrably assisted by digital or plastic slides, and should cover the most important parts of what you have worked on and be prepared to answer questions about your work. Every member of the group needs to contribute during the presentation, and each group member will be graded individually for their part. The total length of the presentation should not be significantly longer than 20 minutes.

Although you will be graded individually, you should however still be familiar with all the material in your project, including the parts that you were not personally primarily responsible for.

Dates:

You should notify Birgit and Jan and get approval for your project topic and the composition of your group by Thursday November 10. The presentations will be held during section time on Wednesday November 30 and during lecture time on Thursday December 1. The presentations may be held in a different location than the regular classes, more information on this later. You should be done writing most of your written report before the presentations, but you can use the feedback you get during the presentation to make improvements to the report during the following week. The final deadline for handing in the report is then during the final lecture, which is on Thursday December 8.

Suggested topics

The following are some suggestions on broad topics for term projects. There are very few references on this page, but if you look at the web page for for Spring 2005, you can find an extensive list of references for some topics there just below the lecture notes, although this list needs some cleaning (also, the notation used in referencing journals may or may not be clear to you, ask us if you need help to interpret it). You should also be able to find plenty of material (perhaps even too much) for most of the topics online just by googling. You can also ask us if you want us to recommend some reading material. If you find some references that you think are especially good, then let us know, and we can add it to the webpage for future use. As you can see, the by far largest body of topics suggested so far is under physical realizations of qubit systems. This is just because this is what the majority of students have selected in past semesters, and because it is where the the heaviest research focus is these days, but feel free to select one of the less worked-on topics if you want to. Contact us if you have any questions about any of the topics or need some guidance or advice in choosing one.

These are just suggestions, feel free to suggest others (although we do reserve the right to approve or not approve your suggestion).