Week 1 — Open quantum systems. Density matrices, partial trace, purification, entropy. The real qubit, T1, T2, thermal occupation, two-level-system defects. Quantum channels, Kraus operators, the Lindblad master equation.
Week 2 — Measurement and phase space. POVMs, stochastic master equation, quantum trajectories, feedback, feedforward, heralding. Phase-space representations, Wigner, Husimi, Glauber–Sudarshan, characteristic functions, Gaussian states.
Week 3 — Linear systems, amplifiers, detectors. Coupled linear systems, cooperativity, mediated coupling, adiabatic elimination, reservoir engineering. Parametric oscillators and amplifiers, quantum limits on amplification, photon counting, homodyne and heterodyne detection, efficiency, added noise, noise temperature, mode matching.
Week 4 — Quantum metrology. Standard quantum limit, single- and two-mode squeezing, SU(1,1) interferometry, squeezed light in gravitational-wave detectors. Fisher information, Cramér–Rao bounds, atomic clocks, quantum advantage in sensing.
Week 5 — Resources and error correction. Entanglement, discord, contextuality, magic, state of the art in many-body entanglement and quantum simulation. Quantum error correction, key theorems, surface code, bosonic codes, quantum LDPC codes, cryogenics and scaling bottlenecks across platforms.
Week 6 — Quantum computing. Key quantum algorithms, quantum advantage in computing, out-of-time-order correlators as a path to practical quantum advantage.
