A Talk on Quantum Cryptography, or How Alice Outwits Eve

Alice and Bob wish to communicate without the archvillainess Eve eavesdropping on their conversation. Alice, decides to take two college courses, one in cryptography, the other in quantum mechanics. During the courses, she discovers she can use what she has just learned to devise a cryptographic communication system that automatically detects whether or not Eve is up to her villainous eavesdropping. Some of the topics discussed are Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the Vernam cipher, the BB84 and B92 cryptographic protocols. The talk ends with a discussion of some of Eve's possible eavesdropping strategies, opaque eavesdropping, translucent eavesdropping, and translucent eavesdropping with entanglement.Comment: 31 pages, 8 figures. Revised version of a paper published in "Coding Theory, and Cryptography: From Geheimscheimschreiber and Enigma to Quantum Theory," (edited by David Joyner), Springer-Verlag, 1999 (pp. 144-174). To be published with the permission of Springer-Verlag in an AMS PSAPM Short Course volume entitled "Quantum Computation.

Distributed quantum computing: A distributed Shor algorithm

We present a distributed implementation of Shor's quantum factoring algorithm on a distributed quantum network model. This model provides a means for small capacity quantum computers to work together in such a way as to simulate a large capacity quantum computer. In this paper, entanglement is used as a resource for implementing non-local operations between two or more quantum computers. These non-local operations are used to implement a distributed factoring circuit with polynomially many gates. This distributed version of Shor's algorithm requires an additional overhead of O((log N)^2) communication complexity, where N denotes the integer to be factored.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, extra figures are remove

Entanglement Criteria - Quantum and Topological

This paper gives a criterion for detecting the entanglement of a quantum state, and uses it to study the relationship between topological and quantum entanglement. It is fundamental to view topological entanglements such as braids as entanglement operators and to associate to them unitary operators that are capable of creating quantum entanglement. The entanglement criterion is used to explore this connection. The paper discusses non-locality in the light of this criterion.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX, to appear in proceedings of Spie Conference, Orlando, Fla, April 200