Important announcement

Dear visitor,

Please note that this OpenCourseWare platform will be replaced at the end of 2026 by a new platform (under the same url ocw.tudelft.nl).

Courses and their contents that are currently available the platform will partly be migrated. URL’s for this content will change and content might be unavailable for some time. In addition, some courses will not be available anymore.

If you are linking to specific courses on this platform (for instance for your students), please take timely measures to avoid problems with access. Possible actions are:

  • Download the materials to your local platform (laptop, server)
  • For educators only (including TU Delft lecturers): Contact us at ocw@tudelft.nl and inform us what course you are using in what context (institute, program, period of use, number of students). We will research (in collaboration with the authors of the course) and decide if we will migrate the course, and if yes, can supply you with a new url.

Thank you.

1.2.3 The Bloch sphere

Course subject(s) Module 1: Working with Single Qubits

Until now, we have seen qubits only in the braket notation. To get a more visual and geometrical understanding of a single qubit, Arjen will introduce the Bloch Sphere. This three dimensional sphere of radius 1, can also help us understand the action of unitary gates and measurement on a single qubit.

Main Takeaways

  • On the Z axis of the Bloch Sphere the eigenstates of the Z basis are found, this also is followed by the X and Y axis.
  • The Born Rule is the underlying reason why any single qubit can be represented on the Bloch Sphere.
  • Unitary gates operations can be represented as rotations on the Bloch Sphere.
  • A measurement on a certain basis projects the qubit state onto one of its eigenstates.
Creative Commons License
Fundamentals of Quantum Information by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://online-learning.tudelft.nl/courses/fundamentals-of-quantum-information/ /
Back to top
[sg_popup id=6]