'Introduction to Quantum Information' Course Page

Hilary Term 2026

Zhenyu Cai

Last updated on May 12, 2026 4 min read

Hi all, welcome to C7.4 Introduction to Quantum Information taught by Prof. Artur Ekert. I am the coordinating tutor for the course and I will lay out some general information about the course here.

The course lecture notes are available online and also in PDF. Note that the lecture notes contain some additional exercises beyond the problem sheets and also some non-examinable topics that are mainly of interest. For the guest lectures, here are the links to the lecture notes and slides on Quantum Error Correction. Note that the materials in the guest lectures are examinable.

There are some preliminary materials on the basic concepts for the course, which overlap with parts of the lecture notes but nevertheless can be helpful to read through.

The accompanying lecture videos are embedded in the online version of the book, but they can also be found as a standalone series on Youtube (in a slightly different order). Not all topics in the videos are examinable. In particular, lecture 8 of the videos covers topics in Quantum Error Correction that are not covered in the lectures like the quantum error correction criterion. They are not examinable, but nonetheless these are very interesting concepts to explore.

You can find the problem sheets and past exam papers below.

In addition, there are some interesting perspective pieces to be read at your leisure, to have a glimpse into different ways to harness the power of the quantum wizardry. One of the most fascinating examples is the Quantum Bomb Tester, a way to detect an ultra-sensitive (maybe an understatement) bomb without setting it off. In fact, this is actually one of the problems that you’ll encounter in Problem Sheet 1.

If you have any questions about the tutorial classes, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the tutor of your class: Christian Binder, Muhammad Hamza Waseem and Po-Wei Huang. For any other questions about the course, you can always contact me.

Below we have listed the examinable topics for 2026 for reference.

Examinable Topics (2026)

Fundamentals of quantum theory: probability amplitudes, addition of amplitudes, quantum interference, Hilbert-space description of states, unitary evolution of closed quantum systems, projective measurements, orthogonal projectors, and the Born rule.
Fundamentals of computer science: binary strings, bitwise addition of binary strings, computational complexity, and the basic complexity classes P, NP, EXP, BPP, and BQP.
Elementary single-qubit quantum gates: Pauli gates, phase gate, Hadamard gate, and the T gate.
Single-qubit interference: the Hadamard–phase–Hadamard circuit. Clifford gates and universal gate sets: the Clifford group, universality, and the special role of the T gate.
Matsumoto–Amano normal form: normal forms for single-qubit circuits over the Clifford+T gate set.
Multi-qubit Hadamard transform: the Hadamard transform on many qubits.
Two-qubit gates and entanglement: the controlled-NOT gate, tensor-product structure, entangled states, and Bell states.
Phase kickback: phase kickback induced by controlled-U operations and by quantum Boolean-function evaluation.
Quantum circuits: circuit notation and step-by-step execution of elementary quantum circuits.
Basic quantum protocols: the no-cloning theorem, superdense coding, and quantum teleportation.
Basic quantum algorithms: Deutsch’s algorithm, the Bernstein–Vazirani algorithm, and Simon’s algorithm.
Open quantum systems: density matrices, statistical mixtures of pure states, the partial trace, and the Born rule for density operators.
The Bloch sphere: representation of single-qubit density operators by Bloch vectors and the action of quantum gates on the Bloch sphere.
Quantum channels: isometries, Kraus representations, and unitary equivalence of different Kraus representations.
Positive and completely positive maps: completely positive versus merely positive maps, with examples of positive maps that are not completely positive.
Basic concepts of quantum error correction: quantum codes, code distance, error syndromes, and error detection.
Parity checks: X-checks and Z-checks, parity-check circuits, and Tanner graphs.
Stabilisers: stabiliser generators, stabiliser groups, and the stabiliser description of quantum codes.
Surface code: basic principles — what it is, how its parity checks work, and its Tanner-graph representation.

'Introduction to Quantum Information' Course Page

Examinable Topics (2026)

Course Materials

Problem Sheets

Past year exams

Fun Reads

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