Begin forwarded message:

 

From: "Davis, Jolanta M." <jmdavis@fas.harvard.edu>

Subject: April 24, 8pm - 2019 David M. Lee Historical Lecture in Physics - Anton Zeilinger, "Quantum Information and Quantum Communication, Foundations and Prospects"

Date: April 16, 2019 at 3:54:19 PM EDT

To: "Davis, Jolanta M." <jmdavis@fas.harvard.edu>

 

Please forward to your department faculty, students, and research scholars this information about the 2019 David M. Lee Historical Lecture in Physics.

 

In addition to the Lee Lecture mentioned below, on Thursday, April 25, Professor Zeilinger will also present and speak about a film he had commissioned, "Exile and Excellence: The Class of '38", which features 16 eminent Austrian-born US American and British scholars, who share their life stories after they managed to escape Nazi persecution as children in Austria. One of the scholars featured in the movie is Prof. Gerald Holton from the Physics Department at Harvard University.

 

This event (on April 25) will be held at Harvard's Center for European Studies (CES), at 4:30-6:00. For more information, please see:https://ces.fas.harvard.edu/events/2019/04/austrian-academy-of-sciences---charles-maier-organizing

 

 

David M. Lee Historical Lectures in Physics, sponsored by the Marvin and Annette Lee Fund, are free and open to the public.

 

April 24, 2019

8:00 pm

Jefferson Laboratories 250

Physics Department

17 Oxford Street

Cambridge, MA

 

A dessert reception following the lecture will be held in Jefferson 450 – Physics Department Library.

 

 

Anton Zeilinger

 

Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology, University of Vienna

Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences

 

 

“Quantum Information and Quantum Communication, Foundations and Prospects”

 

 

It is curious that the development of quantum physics – arguably the most successful description of nature ever – was accompanied by fundamental debates from the early days until today. Schrödinger’s cat, Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” and his comment that “God does not play dice with the Universe” are deeply rooted in fundamental features of the theory: superposition, entanglement and randomness. The concept of Quantum Information encompasses these fundamental features. In the talk, I will discuss some fundamental experiments. For example, in delayed-choice entanglement swapping, the decision whether two photons which share no common past are entangled or not can be made at the time when they already have been detected. An interesting and very visual workhorse are orbital angular momentum states of photons. They opened up the possibility for higher-dimensional quantum experiments. That way, entanglement has been confirmed for quantum numbers above 10.000 and between two more than 100-dimensional quantum states. In the talk, I will also mention recent experiments in higher dimensions where the setup has been designed by the computer program Melvin. Finally, a recent Cosmic Bell Test experiment will be discussed, where the randomness is taken from fluctuations of light from distant quasars. The talk will conclude with a most technical application, the implementation of intercontinental quantum cryptography between Beijing and Vienna via the Chinese quantum satellite Micius, and with The Big Bell Test involving 100.000 participants providing independent input for 13 experiments on 5 continents.

 

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Jolanta M. Davis | Administrator to the Chair | Harvard University | Department of Physics | 17 Oxford St., Jefferson 370 | Cambridge, MA 02138 | Tel.: 617-495-2866 | Fax: 617-495-0416 | https://www.physics.harvard.edu/