Lab Home | Phone | Search
Center for Nonlinear Studies  Center for Nonlinear Studies
 Home 
 People 
 Current 
 Executive Committee 
 Postdocs 
 Visitors 
 Students 
 Research 
 Publications 
 Conferences 
 Workshops 
 Sponsorship 
 Talks 
 Seminars 
 Postdoc Seminars Archive 
 Quantum Lunch 
 Quantum Lunch Archive 
 P/T Colloquia 
 Archive 
 Ulam Scholar 
 
 Postdoc Nominations 
 Student Requests 
 Student Program 
 Visitor Requests 
 Description 
 Past Visitors 
 Services 
 General 
 
 History of CNLS 
 
 Maps, Directions 
 CNLS Office 
 T-Division 
 LANL 
 
Thursday, October 20, 2011
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Postdoc Seminar

Extracting perfectly random bits from an i.i.d. stream (oh, and concentrating quantum entanglement, too!)

Robin Blume-Kohout
T-4 and CNLS

This all started because we were trying to figure out how to compress quantum data *adaptively* -- i.e., without a priori knowing the source. This seems hard, because in quantum info processing, you have one hand tied behind your back. Specifically, the "Actually look at what you're doing" hand -- because that would collapse the data! Anyway, we solved the problem. Our algorithm compresses quantum data, concentrates quantum entanglement, and makes coffee. But *how* it works is arguably more interesting, because at its heart is a novel and somewhat strange transformation that we called "The Streaming Elias Transform", which separates an i.i.d. stream of bits into (i) perfectly predictable bits, and (ii) perfectly random (unknown) bits, using insanely low memory [log(N)]. I'll introduce the problem (5 minutes), explain the streaming Elias transform in (20 minutes), and try desperately to put it in context (5 minutes). It's all nicely written up in , with pretty figures.

Host: Peter Loxley, loxley@lanl.gov