DATE, TIME, PLACE: Tuesday September 9, 8:00 p.m., Hoyt Auditorium, River 人妻少妇专区
Anton Zeilinger, one of the world鈥檚 leading experts in the field of quantum optics, will present a free, public lecture Tuesday at the 人妻少妇专区. The talk, titled 鈥淔rom Einstein鈥檚 Spook and Schr枚dinger鈥檚 Cat to Quantum Communication and Quantum Computation,鈥� is designed to convey the exciting frontiers of quantum mechanics to a general audience.
Zeilinger, a professor of experimental physics at the University of Vienna and president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, has made tremendous contributions to our understanding of how the universe works at its most fundamental level. His innovative experiments have led to groundbreaking discoveries into such quantum phenomena as entanglement, a property that governs pairs of subatomic particles where manipulation of one particle has an instant effect on another. Most recently, Zeilinger鈥檚 research group exploited this property of two photons, the quantum of light, to create an image from a series of photons that never actually interacted with the object to be imaged. All the necessary information came from their entangled twins.
Zeilinger is well-known for pushing the boundaries of current knowledge. In the 1980s, he and his colleagues were the first to theorize鈥攁nd later demonstrate in the lab鈥攖hat it was possible to entangle more than two photons. 聽In a recent feat, Zeilinger led a group that successfully transmitted quantum states between entangled photons across two of Spain鈥檚 Canary Islands, separated by a distance of 90 miles.
This idea of quantum teleportation has a host of practical applications, including the development of ultra-secure ways to transmit confidential information. By using what鈥檚 called a 鈥渜uantum key distribution,鈥� a message could be encrypted on one photon and decrypted from the entangled photon. If a third party tried to interfere, the quantum system would collapse and reveal the security breach.
Zeilinger was awarded the Institute of Physics鈥� inaugural Isaac Newton medal in 2008 for 鈥渉is pioneering conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, which have become the cornerstone for the rapidly-evolving field of quantum information.鈥� He writes about the weirdness of quantum physics, and the experiments confirming its reality, in his 2010 book Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation.
For more on Anton Zeilinger, read his profiles in and , and an .
