Nicolas Jean Cerf (born 1965) is a Belgian physicist. He is professor of
quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, ...
and
information theory
Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification (science), quantification, computer data storage, storage, and telecommunication, communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist a ...
at the
Université Libre de Bruxelles and a member of the
Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium
The Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium (RASAB) is a non-governmental association which promotes and organises science and the arts in Belgium by coordinating the national and international activities of its constituent academies su ...
. He received his Ph.D. at the
Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1993, and was a researcher at the
Université de Paris 11 and the
California Institute of Technology. He is the director of th
Center for Quantum Information and Computationat the
Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Research
Together with
Christoph Adami, he defined the quantum version of conditional and mutual entropies,
which are basic notions of Shannon's
information theory
Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification (science), quantification, computer data storage, storage, and telecommunication, communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist a ...
, and discovered that quantum information can be negative
(a pair of entangled particles was coined a
qubit-antiqubit pair). This has led to important results in quantum information sciences, for example
quantum state merging. He is best known today for his work on
quantum information with continuous variables. He found a Gaussian quantum cloning transformation (see
no-cloning theorem) and invented a Gaussian
quantum key distribution protocol, which is the continuous counterpart of the so-called
BB84 protocol, making a link with
Shannon's theory of
Gaussian channels. This has led to the first experimental demonstration of continuous-variable quantum key distribution with optical
coherent states and
homodyne detection.
Honors
He received the Caltech President’s Fund Award in 1997, and the Marie Curie Excellence Award
in 2006.
Works
*
References
External links
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cerf, Nicolas
Living people
Vrije Universiteit Brussel alumni
1965 births
Academic staff of the Université libre de Bruxelles
Belgian physicists
Theoretical physicists