Reservoir engineering for quantum information processing

This thesis concerns possible implementations of quantum computing schemes and tries to overcome some standard limitations. The central result is a technique
we call reservoir engineering that is applied to optical cavity QED based quantum computing. The usual problem for quantum computing with atomic qubits in cavities
is scalability as this requires either the coupling of photons leaking from cavities,using linear optics elements and measurements or shuttling of ions into and out of
cavities. We propose an alternative that applies strong dissipative coupling to an environment as a control on fibre-coupled cavity systems. The control mechanism is
effectively an overdamping of certain common cavity modes that restricts the time evolution of the qubit-cavity system onto a smaller subsystem consisting of only one
common cavity modes. Within this subsystem, we then show that it is possible to implement quantum computing schemes that apply otherwise only to atomic qubits in the same cavity.