Scott Aaronson, MIT
Quantum Money from Hidden Subspaces
Yingdan Wang, McGill
It’s often useful to have a private conversation within a public world. What role can quantum cryptography play in keeping conversations private? Sometimes described as providing “unconditional security guaranteed by the laws of quantum physics,” its security implications are both tantalizing and surprisingly elusive. This talk introduces quantum cryptography and describes the speaker’s experience creating several types of quantum cryptography equipment, within the broader context of mainstream cryptography and secure communications.
Biography
Evidence is presented for the finite wave vector crossing of the two lowest one-dimensional spin-split subbands in quantum point contacts fabricated from two-dimensional hole gases with strong spin-orbit interaction. This phenomenon offers an elegant explanation for the anomalous sign of the spin polarization filtered by a point contact, as observed in magnetic focusing experiments. Anticrossing is introduced by a magnetic field parallel to the channel or an asymmetric potential transverse to it.
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing's birth, the Institute for Quantum Computing will host a free screening of Codebreaker, a feature documentary about the father of computer science.
Aashish Clerk, McGill University
Slow neutrons are used in a very broad spectrum of scientific investigations. I will discuss how neutrons are liberated from nuclei and lowered in energy to regimes of interest. I will also discuss some examples of experiments, mainly motivated by questions in nuclear/particle/astrophysics.
Helen Fay Dowker, Imperial College London
We provide the first two-party protocol allowing Alice and Bob to evaluate privately even against active adversaries a completely positive, trace-preserving map F, given as a quantum circuit, upon their joint quantum input state. Our protocol leaks no more to any active adversary than an ideal functionality for F provided Alice and Bob have the cryptographic resources for active secure two-party classical computation.