Carla Ferradini – PhD student in QIT group, ETH Zurich
“Information is Physical” and, at any point in time, physical systems occupy space. Hence, information, being a physical system itself, must also have a location in spacetime. It may seem straightforward to assign a spacetime location to a bit of information by using the location of its carrier. However, in a world governed by quantum mechanics intriguing features arise, since the information carrier and the reference frames used to define its state are quantum systems. Location of information becomes a perspective-dependent notion. Therefore, cryptography and other information processing tasks, which rely on the assumption that specific information is localised, are critically affected. In this talk, I show how this issue arises from abstractions in quantum information theory that exclude spacetime from consideration. Then, I discuss how to reintroduce spacetime into the language of quantum information theory and whether and how quantum information processing tasks can still be effectively performed in this world.
References
- https://arxiv.org/abs/1007.2292
Recording
https://video.ethz.ch/events/2024/theory/7fddc632-8324-47f7-8310-b376ae84784e.html