Intrinsic Quantum Computation
How are computing, information creation, and dynamics related? A contemporary view of these three historical threads is that they are not so disparate. A synthesis leads to methods to analyze how quantum processes store and manipulate information - what we refer to as intrinsic quantum computation.
We illustrate a new kind of quantum information processing. In quantum computation the experimentalist subjects information stored in an initially coherent set of physical degrees of freedom to a selected sequence of manipulations. The system's resulting state is measured and interpreted as the output of a computation. Our computation-theoretic approach, in contrast, applies to continuous computation and shows how information processing is embedded in the dynamics of even simple quantum systems.
For more information see a recent paper titled Intrinsic Quantum Computation by James Crutchfield and Karoline Wiesner.