Hume Seminar Series: Quantum Entanglement and its Applications to Information Security

The Speaker

Join this Hume Seminar to hear from Gianluca Longoni, Senior Cybersecurity Engineer, ManTech International Corporation.

About the Event

Albert Einstein used to call it “spooky action at a distance," quantum entanglement has been predicted a long time before the transistor was even invented. Probably one of the most fascinating phenomena in the quantum world, the concept of entanglement refers to the perfect correlation of quantum states, such as spin or momentum, assumed by photons under certain conditions. When electromagnetic radiation (such as a light beam) is polarized, it is possible to split the photons into two beams with strictly correlated quantum states or entangled. That means that the quantum state of the entangled system cannot be described as a combination of the individual constituents but as a whole.

This property of quantum entangled system has immediate applications in information security, since if we accept the “Interpretation of Copenhagen” on quantum mechanics, we know that when we perform a measurement or observation on a quantum system, we interact with such system and change its quantum state. If this measurement is performed on a quantum entangled system, the measurement will impact the state of one photon, and due to quantum entanglement, this change will be propagated instantly to its entangled counterpart. This is the basis of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), a technique commonly used today to build quantum networks.

The objective of this seminar is to explore quantum entanglement, review current developments on quantum networks and quantum-secure communication, and possibly drawing inspiration into tackling this challenging research field.