Founders of quantum information win top prize in computer science

"Bennett and Brassard "played a very big part in establishing the foundations of quantum information", says Stephanie Wehner, a quantum-communications researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. "Quantum information is more than a vehicle for classical information. We can do things with it that don't have a classical analogue.""

"Bennett and Brassard's work did not only initiate a whole field of technological development, but it also fed back into researchers' understanding of the Universe, says Jonathan Oppenheim, a theoretical physicist at University College London. Bennett and others have used quantum information as a tool for investigating some of the most nagging problems about black holes."

""People thought it was just a little crazy," says Bennett. "It didn't occur to people that quantum effects could be used to do things that couldn't be done classically." Bennett and Brassard began investigating the power of phenomena that could go beyond what's possible with non-quantum, or 'classical', methods of information technology as far back as the 1970s."

Gilles Brassard and Charles Bennett received the A. M. Turing Award, sharing a US$1-million prize for their foundational contributions to quantum information science. Brassard, a computer scientist at the University of Montreal, and Bennett, a physicist at IBM Research, began investigating quantum phenomena's computational advantages in the 1970s when such work was considered unconventional. Their research demonstrated that quantum effects enable capabilities impossible with classical information technology. This marks the first Turing Award recognizing quantum physics-related work. Their contributions established an entire field of technological development while providing tools for investigating fundamental physics problems, including black hole theory.

Read at Nature