PHYS 513 :: Physics Illinois :: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Course Grading

The grade will be based on a series of problem sets (~70%) and a “research exercise” (~30%).  There will also be small amount of credit for attending/‘grading’ the other student in-class presentations at the end of the semester. For those of you auditing the class, I nevertheless strongly encourage you to work the problem sets.

Problem sets

There will be 11 problem sets for the course.

They serve several purposes:

1. To give you facility with some of the basic concepts we will discuss.

2. To allow you to do some of the underlying derivations (so we won’t have to spend class time on them).

3. To give you some exposure to new online “cloud” quantum processors now available.

Most of the problems are not intended to be difficult, but I highly encourage you to discuss them, and variations of them, amongst yourselves.  Due to the rather simple, and often algebraic, nature of the calculations, and that I encourage you to check your results for “reasonable­ness”, as we will not give much partial credit.  Problem sets will mostly be distributed Tuesdays, due the following Tuesday (by classtime), and (hopefully) graded by the next Tuesday.  In some rare cases extensions may be considered, but I will often want to use the results in class immediately, so this may be difficult.

Research Exercise

This semester there will be three options to satisfy the final research project:

1. Teams of 3-4 students will give a lecture on a specific quantum information topic (mostly systems for quantum computing, e.g., trapped ions, superconductors, semi-conductors, etc.). I will have a fairly structured breakdown of material to be included (e.g., intro material, gate techniques, algorithms, decoherence effects and error correction, and challenges to scalability). The presentations will be given the last 3 weeks of the course. Grades will be based on individual presentations and the group as a whole. More details, and how to sign up, will be forthcoming.

2. Most of the remaining students will individually write a paper (~PRL length) on a topic of mutual interest, based on 4-5 relevant articles (including one very recent one from the quant-ph archive). Again, I will give further guidelines later.

3. Starting this year we will explore a new option, an extended programming project using one of the online "cloud" quantum processors. More details to come.

 

Gradebook

You will be able to view your grades on all components of the course using the course gradebook. Please check that your assignment grades are correctly entered in the gradebook.

Any discrepancies found in your student gradebook should be brought to the attention of your TA immediately.

Course grading will proceed in compliance with University policy as given in Article 3, Part 1 of the Student Code.