Boston Chapter of the IEEE Photonics Society

Abstract:  This talk will address two questions: what is entanglement? and what is so weird about it? After a brief introduction to quantum bits (or qubits) and their physical realizations, a discussion will be given of entangled states of qubits and their physical realizations. Following this, some experiments will be presented that bring out the weird features of entanglement. Then an overview will be given of some processes that exploit the weirdness of entanglement. However the last point will be touched on only superficially, with a more detailed exploration being left to the later talks in the series (with the talk by Wootters providing a particularly spectacular example). This talk will avoid technicalities and mathematics and concentrate on the physical issues instead.

Biography:  P.K.Aravind is a Professor of Physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA. He has worked on proofs of Bell's theorem without inequalities and on problems in quantum information theory. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics of the UK.