Physics Viewpoint: "Too entangled to quantum compute one-way"

Physics is an new APS initiative to highlight select articles for Physical Review journals, very much in the model of the commentaries that appear on articles in journals like Science. Many (all?) of the articles are written by researchers in the field, and are meant to be readable by a wide audience of physicists and serve as a sieve for what a good broad physicist should know about what is currently going on in physics.

Today, a highlight I wrote about two recent PRLs has appeared: Too entangled to quantum compute one-way. This paper highlights two recent papers on entanglement in one-way quantum computing: D. Gross, S. T. Flammia, and J. Eisert, "Most Quantum States Are Too Entangled To Be Useful As Computational Resources" Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 190501 (2009) (arXiv:0810.4331) and M. J. Bremner, C. Mora, and A. Winter, "Are Random Pure States Useful for Quantum Computation?" "http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.190501 ">Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 190502 (2009) (arXiv:0812.3001). (With the bonus appearance of arXiv:0903.5236 by Richard Low.)