John A. Smolin (born 1967) is an American
physicist
A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe.
Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...
and Fellow of the
American Physical Society
The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...
at
IBM's
Thomas J. Watson Research Center
The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. The center comprises three sites, with its main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, U.S., 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City, Albany, New York and with ...
.
Smolin is best known for his work in
quantum information
Quantum information is the information of the state of a quantum system. It is the basic entity of study in quantum information theory, and can be manipulated using quantum information processing techniques. Quantum information refers to both th ...
theory, where, with collaborators, he introduced several important techniques, including
entanglement distillation
Entanglement distillation (also called ''entanglement purification'') is the transformation of ''N'' copies of an arbitrary entangled state \rho into some number of approximately pure Bell pairs, using only local operations and classical commun ...
, for quantum error-correction and the faithful transmission of quantum information through noisy
quantum channel
In quantum information theory, a quantum channel is a communication channel which can transmit quantum information, as well as classical information. An example of quantum information is the state of a qubit. An example of classical information i ...
s, as well as for entanglement-assisted transmission of classical information. He helped elucidate the complex relations between classical and quantum capacities of various channels as well as phenomena such as data hiding and data unlocking that have no analog in classical information theory.
Together with
Charles H. Bennett he built the world's first working demonstration of
quantum cryptography
Quantum cryptography is the science of exploiting quantum mechanical properties to perform cryptographic tasks. The best known example of quantum cryptography is quantum key distribution which offers an information-theoretically secure solution ...
in 1989,
[Bennett, Bessette, Brassard Salvial, and Smoli]
"Experimental Quantum Cryptography"
J. of Cryptology 5, 3-28 (1992) driven by software written by Francois Bessette,
Gilles Brassard
Gilles Brassard, is a faculty member of the Université de Montréal, where he has been a Full Professor since 1988 and Canada Research Chair since 2001.
Education and early life
Brassard received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell Unive ...
and Louis Salvail and implementing the
BB84
BB84 is a quantum key distribution scheme developed by Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard in 1984. It is the first quantum cryptography protocol. The protocol is provably secure, relying on two conditions: (1) the quantum property that informatio ...
quantum key distribution protocol.
Smolin coined the term "Church of the Larger Hilbert Space" to describe the habit of regarding every
mixed state of a quantum system as a pure entangled state of a larger system, and every irreversible evolution as a reversible (
unitary
Unitary may refer to:
Mathematics
* Unitary divisor
* Unitary element
* Unitary group
* Unitary matrix
* Unitary morphism
* Unitary operator
* Unitary transformation
* Unitary representation
* Unitarity (physics)
* ''E''-unitary inverse semigroup ...
) evolution of a larger system.
References
External links
John Smolin's blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Smolin, John A.
1967 births
Living people
MIT Department of Physics alumni
21st-century American physicists
University of California, Los Angeles alumni