Monday, March 15, 1999
3:00 PM (refreshments 2:45)
Grier Room, Room 34-401B
EECS Special Seminar
Abstract
Most physics students, with their first lesson on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, are given a subliminal message: quantum mechanics is a limitation. The attitude is, "Quantum mechanics is something we deal with because we have to, but wouldn't the world have been so much better if we could just measure a particle's position and momentum simultaneously?" This talk is about the counterpoint to that attitude. Recent advances in the fields of quantum computation, quantum cryptography, and quantum information theory show that the physical resources supplied by the quantum world are anything but a limitation. With these new resources, we can do things almost undreamt of before, from the secure distribution of one-time pads for use in cryptography, to the factoring of large numbers with a polynomial number of steps. The magic ingredient in all this is something called quantum information. I will illustrate the subtle strangeness of this new kind of information and the nice effects it buys, with several concrete examples drawn from my own work in quantum cryptography and quantum channel-capacity theory.
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Modified: Mar 5, 1999|
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