Charles H. Bennett, is physicist, information theorist and IBM Fellow at IBM Research. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Gdańsk, and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Royal Society of London.
Most of his research has been on the relation between physics and information, refuting or clarifying ideas like “measurement and computation require the generation of at least a fixed amount of entropy for each bit of information acquired or processed”, and “entropy generation leads to self-organization.” He is one of the founders of quantum information theory, which extended Shannon’s classical theory of communication and Turing’s classical theory of computation to include superposition and entanglement, with a classical channel now viewed as a quantum channel with an eavesdropper, and a classical computer as a quantum computer handicapped by having eavesdroppers on all its wires. His public lectures have sought to demystify quantum mechanics, introducing analogies like “the monogamy of entanglement” and “quantum information is like the information in a dream” to help both scientists and lay people overcome the field’s radical weirdness and replace it by a mature quantum intuition.
In 1973, building on the work of IBM’s Rolf Landauer, Bennett showed that general-purpose computation can be accomplished by a thermodynamically reversible apparatus. In 1980’s, building on Wiesner’s revolutionary but impractical notion of unforgeable quantum banknotes, Bennett, with Gilles Brassard of Université de Montréal and their students, invented and implemented quantum key distribution, the earliest and most commercially mature application of quantum information processing (albeit a niche market). Beginning in the 1990s, with Brassard, Wiesner and other collaborators, he showed that, though entanglement entanglement by itself has no communication capacity, it is a useful and quantifiable resource for two now ubiquitous primitives of quantum information processing: superdense coding (which doubles a quantum channel’s classical capacity), and quantum teleportation (which enables quantum information to be transmitted over a classical channel and was cited in the 2022 physics Nobel prize). His work on entanglement distillation stimulated and benefited from the pioneering and continuing work by Gdańsk researchers on entanglement, including their unexpected discovery of “bound” kinds of entanglement that are useful but cannot be distilled into pure form.
CC BY-SA 2.0 source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ibm_research_zurich/51002548905/
