Professor Artur Ekert FRS

Abstract:

Existing quantum cryptographic schemes are not, as they stand, operable in the presence of noise on the quantum communication channel. Although they become operable if they are supplemented by classical privacy-amplification techniques, the resulting schemes are difficult to analyse and have not been proved secure. We introduce the concept of quantum privacy amplification and a cryptographic scheme incorporating it which is provably secure over a noisy channel. The scheme uses an `entanglement purification' procedure which, because it requires only a few quantum Controlled-Not and single-qubit operations, could be implemented using technology that is currently being developed. The scheme allows an arbitrarily small bound to be placed on the information that any eavesdropper may extract from the encrypted message.

Abstract:

We propose a method for the stabilisation of quantum computations (including quantum state storage). The method is based on the operation of projection into $\cal SYM$, the symmetric subspace of the full state space of $R$ redundant copies of the computer. We describe an efficient algorithm and quantum network effecting $\cal SYM$--projection and discuss the stabilising effect of the proposed method in the context of unitary errors generated by hardware imprecision, and nonunitary errors arising from external environmental interaction. Finally, limitations of the method are discussed.