The object of the final project is to find a research article related to the course material, read it carefully, and write a brief (max 1-2 page, or as little as a couple paragraphs) summary of its results, including some indication of how accessible it was (notation, concepts, etc.) based on material covered during the semester. The object is to determine whether you can read and understand a topical research article at least at the 33-50% level, though it might have been incomprehensible at the start of the semester.

[According to the university guidelines: "A course that requires a culminating end-of-semester exercise and does not offer a final examination must allow students at least until the date appearing on the official examination schedule promulgated by the Office of the University Registrar to complete submission of materials associated with the culminating exercise." For this class, the exam schedule has <Tue 1:00PM-1:59PM ⇒ Thu,13-Dec-12, 07:00PM-09:30PM>, giving until Thu 13 Dec (though easier for me if they're spaced out to arrive earlier).]

Sample arXiv searches (try them!): Cnot, qubit, GHZ, quantum comput*, teleportation, ... , turn up things such as the list below, but feel free especially to survey references therein, or any other resource.

I had planned plan to winnow a list of suggestions from the over 1000 from the past three years with comput* or qubit in title (again, have a look), on the basis of "newsworthiness", in this case meaning that most have received some descriptive link from news or blogspace (follow the "blog link" near the bottom of the right margin). But I found too many, and instead have just listed a very small representative sample, and invite you to suggest more. The ones here are roughly classified according to overall area. Some of the more recent ones have also been mentioned in the latest annual Workshop on Quantum Information Processing. There is another interesting set of references in the Quantum Algorithm Zoo. This list will not be meant to be either definitive or truly representative (and even some of the "classifications" may be wrong), just a sample — feel free to suggest other possibilities.

Recent Surveys

• Limitations to sharing entanglement (Pedagogical review article on monogamy and polygamy of entanglement)
• Tutorial: The trapped-ion qubit toolbox
• Surface codes: Towards practical large-scale quantum computation

NMR and quantum annealing

• Quantum Factorization of 143 on a Dipolar-Coupling NMR system
• Experimental determination of Ramsey numbers with quantum annealing (84 qubits)

Error Correction and Architecture

• Surface code with decoherence: An analysis of three superconducting architectures
• Large Scale Modular Quantum Computer Architecture with Atomic Memory and Photonic Interconnects

Quantum keys and teleportation

• Quantum teleportation using active feed-forward between two Canary Islands

Experimental realizations

• Observation of eight-photon entanglement
• Quantum Gates and Memory using Microwave Dressed States
• Microwave quantum logic gates for trapped ions
• Experimental realisation of Shor's quantum factoring algorithm using qubit recycling
• Generating, manipulating and measuring entanglement and mixture with a reconfigurable photonic circuit
• Controlled-NOT gate operating with single photons
• Entanglement of two superconducting qubits in a waveguide cavity via monochromatic two-photon excitation,
  *Complete universal quantum gate set approaching fault-tolerant thresholds with superconducting qubits,
  Superconducting qubit in waveguide cavity with coherence time approaching 0.1ms,
  A simple all-microwave entangling gate for fixed-frequency superconducting qubits

Theory and Algorithms

• Impossibility of a Quantum Speed-up with a Faulty Oracle
• Optimal quantum searching to find a common element of two sets
• Decomposition of Quantum Gates into Controlled Qubit Gates
• The Topology of Quantum Algorithms