Techniques for formal modelling and analysis of quantum systems

Abstract

Quantum communication and cryptographic protocols are well on the way to becoming an important practical technology. Although a large amount of successful research has been done on proving their correctness, most of this work does not make use of familiar techniques from formal methods such as formal logics for specification, formal modelling languages, separation of levels of abstraction, and compositional analysis. We argue that these techniques will be necessary for the analysis of large-scale systems that combine quantum and classical components. We summarize the results of our investigation using different approaches: behavioural equivalence in process calculus, model-checking and equivalence checking. Quantum teleportation is used as an example to illustrate our techniques. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.