Newswise — On April 4th, Daniel Gottesman, Faculty member of Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics, will take part in the Institute's popular monthly public lecture series. He will speak on the topic of "Quantum Cryptography: A Tale of Secrets Hidden and Revealed Through the Laws of Physics."

Abstract:Sensitive information can be valuable to others - from your personal credit card numbers to state and military secrets. Throughout history, sophisticated codes have been developed in an attempt to keep important data from prying eyes. But now, new technologies are emerging based on the surprising laws of quantum physics that govern the atomic scale. These powerful techniques threaten to crack some secret codes in widespread use today and, at the same time, offer new quantum cryptographic protocols which could one day profoundly alter the way we safeguard critical information.

About the Speaker:Daniel Gottesman received his PhD in 1997 from Caltech, where he was a student of John Preskill. He then held postdoctoral positions at Los Alamos National Lab, Microsoft Research, and UC Berkeley (as a long-term CMI Prize Fellow for the Clay Mathematics Institute). He holds a Faculty position with Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Among other honours, he was included in the 2003 list of MIT Technology Review's "World's Top Young Innovators" and named as CIAR Scholar in the Quantum Information Processing Program.

About PI: Perimeter Institute is an independent, non-profit research centre where international scientists are clustering to push the limits of our understanding of physical laws by contemplating and calculating new ideas about the very essence of space, time, matter and information. The Institute, located in Waterloo just outside Toronto, also provides a wide array of educational outreach activities for students, teachers and the general public across Canada and beyond in order to share the joys of creative inquiry, research, discovery and innovation. Additional information available at http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca.