Resources: popular science articles and overview papers

This is a list of introductory popular science articles and more technical review papers on research topics which interest me.

Quantum information

Photonic chips: boson sampling, simulators and other applications

Measurement-based quantum computation

Quantum simulation

Foundations of quantum mechanics

Quantum non-locality

Quantum entanglement

Quantum contextuality

Here are some introductory texts on quantum contextuality.

1- The original proofs. The Kochen-Specker proof of quantum contextuality was the first one, and has been greatly simplified since, with many other “flavours” having been added to this day. Mermin’s magic square proof is quite clear, it uses 4-dimensional systems (for an introductory presentation of these things, see sections 2.1 and 2.2 of my PhD thesis).

2- A ten-minute explanation by Dave Bacon (2008). It has links to the original paper by Mermin (1993), which is discussed in this paper, for example.

3- For an introductory feel about what contextuality is, see sections I and II of Spekkens et al.’s paper on the contextual model/story known as Specker’s Overprotective Seer.

3- Unifying contextuality and non-locality. In the last few years there has been work that unifies the concepts of contextuality and non-locality, the latter being a special version of the former. The two original papers proposing slightly different versions of this unification are due to Abramsky and Brandenburger; and Cabello, Severini and Winter. They are very mathematical and not the easiest of reads; AB use notions of category theory, which is mathematically sophisticated but hard for novices. Below I’ll indicate some more recent texts which review these notions in a more self-contained and understandable way.

4- Chapter 2 of the Masters’ degree dissertation of Mateus Araújo (elaborating on the original results by Cabello, Severini and Winters).

5- Sections I and II of this paper by Fritz and Chaves (ignore the stuff on entropic inequalities; it reviews part of the work of Abramsky and Branderburger).

6- The original paper by Abramsky and Branderburger might be worth reading, but it requires/introduces many different mathematical notions.

Tips, life of a PhD student