Department of Mathematics Seminar

The Mathematics of Quantum Coin-Flipping

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Speaker(s): Carl Miller (University of Maryland and NIST)
How can two parties carry out a fair coin flip, using only a noiseless quantum channel? In 2007, Carlos Mochon proved a tantalizing result: he showed that fair quantum coin flipping is possible in principle, but he used a protocol that required a huge (exponential) number of time steps. In the twelve years since, despite some continued deep theoretical work on the problem, no improvements to the efficiency of Mochon's protocol have been made. This talk will be about finally untangling the mystery of why quantum coin-flipping is so difficult. We will discuss some surprising mathematical angles on the problem (both old and new), including topics such as operator monotone functions and conformal mappings. This talk is based on arXiv:1909.10103. Email dkrain@math.duke.edu for zoom link. Zoom notes: Email dkrain@math.duke.edu

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