Charles Henry Bennett

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Autor: IBM Research, Licencja: CC BY-SA 2.0
Since coming to IBM Research in 1972, Dr. Bennett has worked on various aspects of the relation between physics and information. In 1973, building on the work of IBM's Rolf Landauer, he showed that general-purpose computation can be performed by a logically and thermodynamically reversible apparatus, which can operate with arbitrarily little energy dissipation per step because it avoids throwing away information about past logical states. In 1982 he proposed a reinterpretation of Maxwell's demon, attributing its inability to break the second law to the thermodynamic cost of destroying, rather than acquiring, information. In collaboration with Gilles Brassard of the University of Montreal, he developed a practical system of quantum cryptography, allowing secure communication between parties who share no secret information initially, based on the uncertainty principle instead of usual computational assumptions such as the difficulty of factoring. In 1989 with the help of John Smolin, he built a working demonstration.

In 1993 Dr. Bennett and Dr. Brassard, in collaboration with Claude Crepeau, Richard Jozsa, Asher Peres, and William Wootters, discovered "quantum teleportation," an effect in which the complete information in an unknown quantum state is decomposed into purely classical information and purely non-classical Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) correlations, sent through two separate channels, and later reassembled in a new location to produce an exact replica of the original quantum state that was destroyed in the sending process. From 1995-1997, working with Smolin, Wootters, IBM's David DiVincenzo, and other collaborators, he helped found the quantitative theory of entanglement and introduced several techniques for faithful transmission of classical and quantum information through noisy channels, part of the larger and recently very active field of quantum information and computation theory. Recently he has worked on the capacities for quantum channels and interactions to simulate one another and the tradeoffs among communications resources.

Dr. Bennett majored in chemistry at Brandeis University and earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1970 for molecular dynamics studies. He is an IBM Fellow, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Bennett was recently awarded the 2018 Wolf Prize for Physics for the development of quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation. (Credit: IBM)