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Physical Society Colloquium
Gilles Brassard
Département d'informatique et recherche operationnelle Can quantum entanglement be used to save on classical communication? Even though entanglement on its own is useless for the transmission of information, it can help reduce the amount of classical communication required for the achievement of some computational tasks when a global input is distibuted among several cooperating participants. In some cases, an exponential saving in communication can be obtained by consuming a modest amount of entanglement. In extreme cases, there are distributed tasks that cannot be accomplished at all in a classical world when communication is not allowed, but that become possible if the non-communicating parties share prior entanglement. This leads to the question of how expensive it is, in terms of classical communication, to provide an exact simulation of the spooky power of entanglement. No prior knowledge of quantum information processing will be assumed.
Friday, April 12th 2002, 15:30 |