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Date: Friday, November 19, 2010
Place: CAB G 61 (ETH Zentrum)
Time: 16:15
Hosts: Stefan Wolf, Ueli Maurer
Quantum Information and Privacy
Charles H. Bennett, IBM Research, Yorktown Heights (NY)
and
Gilles Brassard, DIRO, University of Montreal
Quantum effects, particularly the uncertainty principle, were originaly regarded as a nuisance for information processing, making quantum systems less reliable than their classical counterparts. But beginning in the 1980’s with quantum money and the no-cloning theorem, an appreciation of the intrinsically private nature of quantum states led to a more positive view, paving the way for new kinds of communication and cryptography and potentially dramatic computational speedups.
We recall some of this history, including how a practical problem - the need for privacy-conserving error correction of raw data generated during quantum cryptography - stimulated the development of a quantitative theory of entanglement and quantum error correction. In subsequent decades the subtle relation between quantum coherence and privacy has continued to yield insights and surprises, such as the phenomena of data hiding and locking, and the existence of channels with private capacity but no quantum capacity.
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ETH Zurich
Dr. Ilona Blatter
QSIT Coordinator
Laboratory for Solid State Physics
HPF E 13
Schafmattstrasse 16
8093 Zurich