José Manuel NievesSEGUIR Updated: Save Send news by mail electrónicoTu name *

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A team of researchers from the australian university of Queensland have just found the way in which students may hide their ignorance for a test and respond correctly, although you don’t know the answers to all the questions. Teachers, also, never would realize your lack of knowledge, nor could they distinguish between the topics that students are familiar with and which are not. The only drawback is that the method can only operate in the quantum world.

The scientists ‘ work, in effect, has managed to verify with success in the laboratory one of these strange ideas of quantum physics that seem to go against all logic or intuition: that the ignorance of the whole implies necessarily the ignorance of the parties. The work has just been published in “Physical Review Letters”.

“The absence of full or partial information, says the article , is called ignorance. Naturally, one might wonder whether the ignorance of a complete system also implies a certain ignorance of its parts. Our intuition is classical, we say yes. However, quantum theory tells us that not: it is possible to encode information in a quantum system so that although there is a certain ignorance at all, it is impossible to identify the unknown part”.

Jacqui Romero, experimental physics of the University of Queensland and lead author of the work ensures that “what is also really good is that we provide an interpretation accessible in the real world of a declaration that comes from the theory of probability pure”. For the researcher, his team’s findings will be important for systems that evaluate the security of the encryption quantum.

ignorance, untraceable

we are told in the intuition, classical, the ignorance can be traced to its source . For example, if the knowledge of a student about a book are incomplete, a teacher might design a test to find out what specific parts of the book are unknown by the student. But that is not the case in the convoluted world of the quantum.

In the words of Michael Kewming, co-author of the research, “our results confirm that the source of the ignorance of the student could be hidden from the master by using quantum systems”.

And is that, according to Kewming, the “alphabets quantum” properties are really strange. “Let’s say that the student -continuing the physical – is undertaking a review that covers two topics, and although it has not been studied, a friend has given him a valuable chop on one of them. In the classic situation, the cheat sheet can be very useful to provide information on one of the topics, although the teacher still could find out the topic ignored by the student. However, a cheat sheet written with our alphabet quantum could contain simultaneously information on both topics, despite the fact that they seem to be one. As a result, the teacher will not be able to determine the source of the ignorance of his pupil. The chop would have served for the two topics.”

Important for encryption

The investigators managed to verify this experimental form by typing information in the form of single photons, the particle constituents of light. “Our result” explains Romero – has implications for the security of the encryption based on quantum physics because we have shown that what is true for the “chops” classic is not for the quantum” .

Unfortunately for the students, the “chops quantum” will take still much time to be available outside of the laboratories.