Quantum Machines Measurement and Control of Engineered Quantum Systems

The beginning of the 20th century saw a revolution in Physics with the discovery that the fundamental constituents of matter and radiation do not obey Newtonian laws, but those of an entirely new theory of motion and its measurement: quantum mechanics. After a century of experimentation in the world of photons, atoms, molecules, and other microscopic particles, the application of quantum laws is presently being extended to the world of macroscopic, engineeredsystems, whose complexity is such that an exhaustive, bottom-up description is both impossible and fruitless. In these so-called quantum machines, the very level of control signals that govern theevolution of the system operates quantum-mechanically. Quantum machines are based on artificial structures like superconducting tunnel junction circuits or semiconductor quantum dots, and this book provides the conceptual tools to build and utilize them.