Abstract:

Quantum effects in information processing, once regarded  nuisance, are now known to make possible feats such as quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation and fast quantum computation.  Although progress toward a practical quantum computer is slow, other surprising quantum informational effects continue to be discovered, and quantum cryptographic systems are already available commercially. Most importantly, quantum information is emerging as the most natural and complete way to formalize notions of communication and computation, extending the conventional theory in much the way the complex numbers extend the real numbers.
　　

Biography:
 
Charles H. Bennett received his PhD from Harvard in 1970 for molecular dynamics studies (computer simulation of molecular motion) under David Turnbull and Berni Alder. For the next two years he continued this research under the late Aneesur Rahman at Argonne Laboratory.

Since coming to IBM Reseach in 1972, Dr. Bennett has worked on various aspects of the relation between physics and information. In 1973, he showed that general-purpose computation can be performed by a logically and thermodynamically reversible apparatus, which can operate with arbitrarily little energy dissipation per step. In collaboration with Gilles Brassard of the University of Montreal he developed a practical system of quantum cryptography, allowing secure communication between parties who share no secret information initially (now this protocol is widely known as BB84).

In 1993 Dr. Bennett together with Brassard, Crepeau, Jozsa, Peres, Wootters, discovered the protocol of "quantum teleportation". He is also the author of the paper about "superdense coding" (with Wiesner, 1992). In 1995-7, working with Smolin, Wootters, IBM's David DiVincenzo, and other collaborators, he helped found the quantitative theory of entanglement and introduced several techniques for faithful transmission of classical and quantum information through noisy channels, part of the larger and recently very active field of quantum information and computation theory. Recently he  worked on the capacities for quantum channels and interactions to simulate one another and the tradeoffs among communications resources.