Quantum gravity meets quantum cryptography

IQC Colloquium - Alex May, Perimeter Institute

The subject of quantum gravity seeks to understand gravitational physics within the framework of quantum mechanics. Increasingly, tools from quantum information, complexity, and cryptography have been brought into this challenging area. Here, I describe a set of connections between quantum gravity, specifically the AdS/CFT correspondence, and a set of cryptographic primitives studied in information theoretic cryptography and position-verification. The cryptographic perspective provides new insights into how gravitational physics can be recorded into quantum mechanics, and led to new gravitational conjectures in AdS space. These conjectures were then proven gravitationally. Conversely, the gravitational perspective has suggested new relationships among these cryptographic primitives, and these relationships were then proven within quantum cryptography. I comment on some directions this cryptography-gravity relationship may lead in the future.