Decoherence and the quantum classical limit

The 2002-2003 lecture is part of a multi-year course on quantum information in general. The possibility of manipulating simple microscopic objects (atoms, photons) in a quantum-coherent way, and the possible generalization of these experiments to increasingly complex mesoscopic systems, opens the way to quantum information processing, a field of science at the frontier between physics and computer science that has been arousing great theoretical and experimental interest in recent years.