This special issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science contains several contributions related to the modern field of Quantum Information and Quantum Computing.

The first two papers deal with entanglement. The paper by R. Mosseri and P. Ribeiro presents a detailed description of the two- and three-qubit geometry in Hilbert space, dealing with the geometry of fibrations and discrete geometry. The paper by J.-G.Luque et al. is more algebraic and considers invariants of pure k-qubit states and their application to entanglement measurement.

This paper reviews recent attempts to describe the two- and three-qubit Hilbert space geometries. In the first part, this is done with the help of Hopf fibrations of hyperspheres. It is shown that the associated Hopf map is strongly sensitive to states’ entanglement content. In the two-qubit case, a generalisation of the celebrated one-qubit Bloch sphere representation is described. In the second part, we present Hilbert space discrete versions, which are comparable to polyhedral approximations of spheres in standard geometry.

We give an algorithm allowing the construction of bases of local unitary invariants of pure k-qubit states from a knowledge of the polynomial covariants of the group of invertible local filtering operations. The simplest invariants obtained in this way are made explicit and compared with various known entanglement measures. Complete sets of generators are obtained for up to four qubits, and the structure of the invariant algebras is discussed in detail.

Quantum physics, together with the experimental (and slightly controversial) quantum computing, induces a twist in our vision of computation, and hence, since computing and logic are intimately linked, in our approach to logic and foundations. In this paper, we discuss the most mistreated notion of logic, truth.

The development of quantum walks in the context of quantum computation, as generalisations of random walk techniques, has led rapidly to several new quantum algorithms. These all follow a unitary quantum evolution, apart from the final measurement. Since logical qubits in a quantum computer must be protected from decoherence by error correction, there is no need to consider decoherence at the level of algorithms. Nonetheless, enlarging the range of quantum dynamics to include non-unitary evolution provides a wider range of possibilities for tuning the properties of quantum walks. For example, small amounts of decoherence in a quantum walk on the line can produce more uniform spreading (a top-hat distribution), without losing the quantum speed up. This paper reviews the work on decoherence, and more generally on non-unitary evolution, in quantum walks and suggests what future questions might prove interesting to pursue in this area.

This paper reviews recent work related to the interplay between quantum information and computation on the one hand and classical and quantum chaos on the other.

First, we present several models of quantum chaos that can be simulated efficiently on a quantum computer. Then a discussion of information extraction shows that such models can give rise to complete algorithms including measurements that can achieve an increase in speed compared with classical computation. It is also shown that models of classical chaos can be simulated efficiently on a quantum computer, and again information can be extracted efficiently from the final wave function. The total gain can be exponential or polynomial, depending on the model chosen and the observable measured. The simulation of such systems is also economical in the number of qubits, allowing implementation on present-day quantum computers, some of these algorithms having been already experimentally implemented.

The second topic considered concerns the analysis of errors on quantum computers. It is shown that quantum chaos algorithms can be used to explore the effect of errors on quantum algorithms, such as random unitary errors or dissipative errors. Furthermore, the tools of quantum chaos allows a direct analysis of the effects of static errors on quantum computers. Finally, we consider the different resources used by quantum information, and show that quantum chaos has some precise consequences on entanglement generation, which becomes close to maximal. For another resource, interference, a proposal is presented for quantifying it, enabling a discussion on entanglement and interference generation in quantum algorithms.