Charles H. Bennett | |
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 Dr. Charles Bennett, IBM Fellow | |
| Born | 1943 (age 81–82) New York, U.S. |
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| Institutions | Thomas J. Watson Research Center |
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| Website | researcher.watson.ibm.com/.. |
Charles Henry Bennett (born 1943)[1] is an Americanphysicist,information theorist andIBM Fellow atIBM Research. Bennett's recent work at IBM has concentrated on a re-examination of the physical basis of information, applyingquantum physics to the problems surrounding information exchange. He has played a major role in elucidating the interconnections between physics and information, particularly in the realm ofquantum computation, but also incellular automata[2] andreversible computing. He discovered, withGilles Brassard, the concept ofquantum cryptography and is one of the founding fathers of modernquantum information theory (seeBennett's four laws of quantum information).
Born in 1943 in New York City, Bennett earned a B.S. in chemistry fromBrandeis University in 1964 and received his PhD fromHarvard in 1970 for molecular-dynamics studies (computer simulation of molecular motion) underDavid Turnbull andBerni Alder. At Harvard, he also worked forJames Watson one year as a teaching assistant about the genetic code. For the next two years he continued this research underAneesur Rahman atArgonne National Laboratory (operated by theUniversity of Chicago).
After joining IBM Research in 1972, he built on the work of IBM'sRolf Landauer to show that general-purpose computation can be performed by a logically and thermodynamically reversible apparatus; and in 1982 he proposed a re-interpretation ofMaxwell's demon, attributing its inability to break the second law to thethermodynamic cost of destroying, rather than acquiring, information.[3] He also published an important paper on the estimation of free-energy differences between two systems, theBennett acceptance ratio method.
In collaboration withGilles Brassard of theUniversité de Montréal, Bennett developed a system ofquantum cryptography, building on an idea ofStephen Wiesner. Known asBB84, the system takes advantage of theuncertainty principle to allow secure communication between parties who share no secret information initially. With the help ofJohn Smolin, he built the world's first working demonstration of quantum cryptography in 1989.
His other research interests includealgorithmic information theory, in which the concepts of information and randomness are developed in terms of the input/output relation of universal computers, and the analogous use of universal computers to define the intrinsic complexity or "logical depth" of a physical state as the time required by a universal computer to simulate the evolution of the state from a random initial state.
In 1993 Bennett and Brassard, in collaboration with others, discovered "quantum teleportation", an effect in which the complete information in an unknown quantum state is decomposed into purely classical information and purely non-classical Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR paradox) correlations, sent through two separate channels, and later reassembled in a new location to produce an exact replica of the originalquantum state that was destroyed in the sending process.
In 1995–1997, working withSmolin,Wootters,DiVincenzo, and other collaborators, he introduced several techniques for faithful transmission of classical and quantum information through noisy channels, part of the larger field of quantum information and computation theory. Together with others he also introduced the concept ofentanglement distillation.
Bennett is a Fellow of theAmerican Physical Society and a member of theNational Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the 2008Harvey Prize by theTechnion[4] and the 2006 Rank Prize in opto-electronics. In 2017 he received theDirac Medal of theICTP and in 2018 theWolf Prize in Physics.[5] In June 2019, he received theShannon Award and for 2019 theBBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences.[6] In 2023 he was awarded theBreakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics[7] and also in 2023 theEduard Rhein Foundation Prize in Technology.[8]
Bennett also co-runs a blog,The Quantum Pontiff, with Steve Flammia andAram Harrow and hosted by Dave Bacon.
Bennett identifies himself as an atheist. Recalling a fond memory of the physicistAsher Peres, he writes:[9]
[Asher] often pretended to consult me, a fellow atheist, on matters of religious protocol. As we waited in line to eat the hors d'oeuvres at a conference in Evanston, he said, "There is a prayer Jews traditionally say when they do something new that they have never done before. I am about to eat a new kind of non-Kosher food. Do you think I should say the prayer?"
