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 cau ...

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 ...

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. Its main laboratory is in Yorktown Heights, New York, 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City. It also operates facilities in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Albany, ...

. 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 t ...

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 Quantum entanglement, entangled state \rho into some number of approximately pure Bell pairs, using only LOCC, local operation ...

, 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 that can transmit quantum information, as well as classical information. An example of quantum information is the general dynamics of a qubit. An example of classical in ...

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 soluti ...

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 Univers ...

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 assuming a perfect implementation, relying on two conditions: (1) t ...

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 semigr ...

) evolution of a larger system.

References

External links

John Smolin's blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Smolin, John A. 1967 births Living people Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni 21st-century American physicists University of California, Los Angeles alumni Fellows of the American Physical Society