Atomic Physics Seminars

Quantum states are hard to visualize. This is true regardless of the system's dimension. Two cases are particularly nice, though: infinite-dimensional systems, for which quantum optics gives us the Wigner, P, and Q representations, and qubits, for which we can use the Bloch-vector representation. The Bloch picture can be generalized to states with finite dimension greater than two, but there are striking and important differences between the D = 2 and D > 2 Bloch pictures. This talk will introduce the Bloch representation of quantum states with D > 2 and will emphasize the similarities and differences as compared to the standard (qubit) case.