Quantum informations first family, revisited

Speaker: Dr. Patrick Hayden, McGill UniversityAbstract: It's been almost two years since Devetak, Harrow and Winter introduced their "mother" and "father" protocols into quantum information theory. In their paper, almost all of the many varieties of capacity and distillation protocols that had been previously been devised in quantum information theory were organized into two sets of children, those descended from the mother and those descended from the father. In this talk, I'll sketch a new and very simple proof of the mother protocol. Along the way, she'll reveal herself to be even more powerful than previously thought. In addition to generating optimal entanglement distillation protocols, I'll show how she provides a straightforward proof of the Horodecki-Oppenheim-Winter negative information result and can be used as a building block for the distributed compression of quantum data. In her new, more powerful form, the mother protocol even generates the father. The original two sets of children are thereby reduced to one and our understanding of quantum information theory is radically simplified: by starting with a single maximally quantum-mechanical protocol and transforming it in a few simple ways we can accomplish most of the tasks of interest in two-party quantum information processing.Bio: Patrick Hayden is currently an assistant professor of computer science at McGill University. Prior to joining McGill in 2004, he spent three years as a Sherman Fairchild Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He obtained his D.Phil. in physics as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and a B.Sc. in mathematics and physics from McGill. His current fascination with quantum information processing was foreshadowed early; as a high school student, he worked summers as a programmer for an operating systems company with the curiously prescient, if premature, name Quantum Software Systems.Host: Professor Igor Devetak, devetak@usc.edu

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - -248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mayumi Thrasher