The International Centre for Theory Of Quantum Technologies (ICTQT UG) invites you to a lecture by the eminent expert in quantum physics and information, prof. Charles Bennett. The event is a prelude to the Q-con Conference: Shaping the Future of Quantum,organised by WMFI and ICTQT . A guest of the Univ. of Gdansk will give a talk entitled. ‘Insights from physics into information theory and vice versa’ on 5 September at 18:00 in auditorium D005 in the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science building.
Charles H. Bennett is a physicist, information theorist and employee of IBM Research. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gdańsk in 2006. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, a foreign member of the Royal Society of London and a former member of the International Scientific Committee of ICTQT(2018-23). Based on the history of quantum information, the guest from the University of Gdańsk will explain why wrong ideas can sometimes stimulate scientific progress more effectively than correct ones and how the history of thermodynamics and information shows that good ideas can be discovered, forgotten and then rediscovered.
Prof. Charles Bennett is one of the founders of quantum information theory, which extended Shannon's classical theory of communication and Turing's classical theory of computation to include superposition and entanglement. His public lectures aimed to demystify quantum mechanics, introducing analogies such as ‘entanglement monogamy’ and ‘quantum information is like information in a dream’ to help both scientists and laypeople overcome the radical strangeness of the field and replace it with a mature quantum intuition.
In 1973, building on the work of Rolf Landauer of IBM, Bennett showed that general-purpose computing could be performed by a thermodynamically reversible apparatus. In 1980, building on Wiesner's revolutionary but impractical concept of unforgeable quantum banknotes, Bennett, together with Gilles Brassard of the Université de Montréal and students, invented and implemented quantum key distribution, the earliest and most commercially mature application of quantum information processing (albeit niche).
Starting in the 1990s, together with Brassard, Wiesner and other collaborators, he demonstrated that, although entanglement itself has no communication capability, it is a useful and measurable resource for two currently ubiquitous primitives of quantum information processing: super-dense coding (which doubles the classical bandwidth of the quantum channel) and quantum teleportation (which allows quantum information to be transmitted over the classical channel and was mentioned in the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics). His work on entanglement distillation benefited from the pioneering and continuing work of Danzig scientists on entanglement, including their unexpected discovery of ‘bound’ types of entanglement that are useful but cannot be distilled to a pure form.
Prof Bennett's lecture is related to the promotion of research conducted by the International Centre For Theory Of Quantum Technologies (ICTQT) at the University of Gdańsk, as part of the project entitled ‘International Centre For Theory Of Quantum Technologies 2.0: B and R Industrial and Experimental Phase’ (contract number FENG.02.01-IP.05-0006/23).