Information & Physics: About Demons, Spooky Actions at a Distance, and Secrets

Vortrag von Stefan Wolf

Datum: 03.03.14  Zeit: 11.00 - 12.00  Raum:

According to Landauer, "information is physical." At first glance, the consequences of this insight appear merely pessimistic. For instance, thermodynamical laws limit the achievable speed of computation and the smallness of information-processing devices. Fortunately, quantum theory and its phenomena such as entanglement and non-locality have been recognized to offer entirely novel perspectives for computer science such as secure communication or computation potentially faster than what is possible by "classical" means.

Stefan Wolf is an associate professor for Informatics at USI since 2011. Born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, he received a Dipl. Math. ETH, followed by a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Professor Ueli Maurer. After a postdoc at McGill University, Montreal, he was Assistant Professor at University of Waterloo, Ontario, and Université de Montréal, Quebec. From 2005 to 2011, he was an SNF Professor for Quantum Information at ETH Zürich. His research domain lies in the fields of cryptography, information theory, and quantum information processing.