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How to decide who keeps the car: Tossing quantum coins moves closer to
reality
November
29, 2011

Alice and Bob have broken up and have moved as far
away from each other as possible. But they still have something to sort out: who
gets to keep the car. Flipping a coin while talking on the phone to decide who
gets to keep it just won't work. There's no trust. Neither believes each other's
result.

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A paper published in Nature Communications by a team of researchers
from Canada and Switzerland explores the concept of coin flipping in the context
of quantum
physics that uses light particles, so-called photons, to allow communication tasks
in a manner that outperforms standard communication schemes.

To understand the researchers' approach, it helps to use an analogy that
involves a safe. Bob flips a coin and sends the result of his coin flip, hidden
in the safe, to Alice. Upon receiving Bob's safe, Alice sends the result of her
own flip to Bob. Once received, Bob sends the key to Alice who unlocks the safe.
Now, Alice and Bob both know each other's coin flip and, according to some
previously agreed-upon rule, who will drive away with the car.

In a world made out of electronic bits, used for communication instead of
safes, the physical safe is replaced by encryption over email. This procedure is believed to be hard to
break. Unfortunately, no one knows if this is truly a good safe. This would
allow Alice to cheat by unlocking Bob's "safe" without awaiting his key, reading
the secret, and choosing the result of her own flip in a way that ensures that
she will keep the car.

But it's a different story with quantum communications.

"What we have shown here is the first implementation of quantum coin flipping
in which a cheater can not take advantage of the fact that photons may get lost
during transmission between Alice and Bob. All previous quantum communication schemes could be broken by a cheater," says
co-author Dr. Wolfgang Tittel, professor in the Institute for Quantum Information Science and the Department of Physics and
Astronomy at the University of Calgary. The other co-authors are from the
University of Calgary, Université de Montréal, École Polytechnique de Montréal
and Université de Genève, in Switzerland.

The quantum coins in this study were tossed with one player being at the
University of Calgary and the other player at the SAIT Polytechnic, roughly 5 km
apart.

"The exchange of quantum bits instead of electronic bits prevents
unrecognized cheating because we base our protocol on properties of nature, such
as the impossibility to perfectly determine the quantum state of a single
photon" say Dr. Félix Bussières, who did parts of his PhD studies at the
University of Calgary, where the experiment was performed, before moving to
Switzerland to take up a postdoctoral fellowship.

"Unfortunately, even in the quantum world, coin flipping at a distance is not perfect either -
it is still possible to cheat, at least to some extent. However, no party can
fix the final outcome with certainty, and, if trying to cheat, risks being
caught cheating."

Nevertheless, this demonstration has made the decision of who gets the car
fairer.

Provided by University of Calgary (news : web)

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Fed_Up_With_Stupid

Nov 29, 2011

Rank: 5 / 5 (2)

I always smile when I see a phrase like
"...so-called photons...". Healthy skepticism or inappropriate idiom? Yes, that
is the correct term for light quanta... *chuckle*

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Tags

quantum
information science, quantum physics, quantum
communication, light
particles, encryption,
quantum

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