Conducting grass-roots level activities for gaining public awareness of leading scientific research is increasingly important objective. The FIRST Quantum Information Processing Project is actively pursuing such public education for elementary and high school students, with the co-operation of the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and the National Institute of Informatics (NII). We also believe that it is important to aid undergraduate and graduate university students, and researchers and technicians in companies to efficiently gain knowledge of cutting edge knowledge.
It is not easy task for students, researchers, and technicians to absorb all the necessary fundamentals of an interdisciplinary field such as quantum information processing, so that they can themselves conduct frontier research. Textbooks that traditionally should be available for self-study tend to be based on outdated content, and are far removed from active research. Even lectures given at universities are often inadequate since it is difficult for a single lecturer to comprehensively cover a broad field such as quantum information.
In view of this situation, the FIRST Quantum Information Processing Project will electronically publish a lecture series for the topic of quantum information. We aim to provide lecture notes for important topics such that they are freely available for lectures at universities, study sessions in research groups, and for private use of researchers.