International Journal of Quantum Information, Special Issue on Foundations of Quantum Information

Quantum mechanics and Information theory are among the most important scientific discoveries of the last century. After developing separately these two areas recently became intertwined because it has been realized that information has a physical nature. Hence, the birth of Quantum Information Science. It has the potential to cause revolutionary advances in the fields of science and engineering. However, aside from the technological impact, Quantum Information has deep conceptual implications, and it has an intrinsically interdisciplinary nature. A lot of conferences have been organized in the last decade on Quantum Information, but no one has been explicitly devoted to the fundamental aspects and has been addressed to emphasize the interdisciplinary character. Starting from these considerations I realized the idea of a meeting that would gave the opportunity to people coming from different fields, like, informatics, mathematics, philosophy and physics, to discuss about foundations and interpretations of Quantum Information. The University of Camerino (Italy), always paying attention to the cutting-edge research fields, supported this challenging idea. Thus, an international meeting on Quantum Information Science, “Foundations of Quantum Information”, was held in Camerino, Italy, during the period April, 16–19, 2004. The aim, probably reached, was to stimulate reflections about the concepts of this new science and to produce interactions across traditional boundaries. This special issue collects the contributions given at the meeting and concerning topics like: quantum logic, non-locality, incompleteness, realism, information and entropy, quantum de-coherence, quantum algorithms, quantum cryptography, quantum complexity, quantum communication, quantum games. It witnesses a sort of “transverse activity” with respect to the natural flow of the specialistic studies aimed to produce a significant transfer of know-how from a branch to another. I hope that its content would be useful and stimulating for the readers. The contributions are presented in the alphabetic order with respect to the name of the presenting author. Those of invited speakers are listed first.