New York, April 10,2002
Dear Sirs:
We believe that the interests of the membership of the American Physical Society
would be better served if there existed a separate topical group whose primary
interest was in the fundamental problems of quantum theory as such, and its
special areas of interest, such as entangled states, and quantum information,
including quantum cryptography, and quantum computing (Quicc). Since the earliest
days of quantum theory, questions concerning its interpretation have arisen,
but it was long thought that there were no experimental ramifications of the
debates that ensued, and the subject was relegated to the sidelines. However
the situation has changed drastically over the last thirty years. In 1964, John
Bell showed that it was possible to experimentally distinguish between the predictions
of quantum mechanics and those of local classically realistic theories, and
this started a race to produce experiments that could make such distinctions.
Over the years, new experimental and theoretical techniques have been developed
that place many of the results of the field squarely within the mainstream interests
of the modem physics community. Some of these techniques include the development
of the neutron interferometer; parametric down-conversion as a method for producing
entangled two-photon states; the long-term trapping of ions; the interference
of atoms scattered off "photonic" crystals; the creation of two-dimensional
quantum systems; the recent achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation; the development
of cavity QED; and the demonstration of quantum teleportation, amongst other
experimental achievements. On the theoretical side, we have, as an outgrowth
of Bell's theorem, the constantly improving classification of entangled states,
and the development of measures of entropy and information content of such states;
GHZ states, Shor's algorithm, various sorting techniques, and error-correcting
codes.
The result of all this progress has been the enormous rise of interest in the
field, from physicists who normally classify themselves as being in the standard
major sub-disciplines of physics, such as quantum optics, or molecular beam
physics. This has led to major results in the field having to be reported at
conferences in these other areas, or published in journals whose major thrust
is in these areas. This has led to the fragmentation of the dissemination of
new knowledge in this field, so that it is sometimes difficult for people directly
concerned with these results to locate them among all the uncentralized places
for the reporting of them.
A consequence of this is that although the field has grown into a somewhat coherent
and easily recognized sub-discipline of its own; there is no centralized place
where results can be reported, such that one can be sure that all the physicists
who are most interested can be sure of receiving them. Some other consequences
of this are that meetings and workshops are often arranged as subgroups of meetings
in other areas, and grant proposals often have to compete with other proposals
in completely different areas, and are refereed by people whose interest and
expertise is in other areas.
For all these reasons, it would be a great boon to research in the field if
one could bring together all these disparate resources so that there was a central
place that could coordinate and organize meetings and workshops, publish newsletters
and perhaps establish an on-line journal, and otherwise coordinate the activities
of the researchers who are active in the area. Another major focus of such a
group would be to draw to the attention of funding agencies the existence of
abroad-based coalition of such researchers, and perhaps to both increase and
organize the level of funding available to the field, and also to expedite the
emergence of new technologies. Actually, the creation of such a topical group
is long overdue, and its existence would have had a strong positive influence
on developments in the field, but unfortunately one could not have hoped to
bring it about before the awareness of the field within the physics community
as a whole had become fairly general. We believe that this has certainly happened,
and that there is a sufficient interest in such a topical group that it would
be to the advantage of the Society to officially recognize it, and thus we offer
you this petition, signed by us and the members below.
Very sincerely yours,
Daniel Greenberger
Dept. of Physics, City College of New York
Anton Zeilinger
Director, Institute of Experimental Physics, Univ. of Vienna