Introduction to the Special Issue on Quantum Information Science

Quantum phenomena provide computing and information handling paradigms that are clearly different and very likely much more powerful than their classical counterparts. Over the past few years, several governments throughout the world have allocated substantial funding aimed at boosting quantum information science. Much progress has been made on the theoretical side, and experiments have been conducted in which quantum computational operations were executed on a small number of quantum bits. In particular, 2019 marked the anniversaries of two principal developments in the field: the 25 years of quantum factoring and 35 years of quantum key distribution algorithms. This special issue showcases the information and coding theory related questions that are central to the field today.