Adrian Kent

Adrian Kent is a British theoretical physicist. He is a professor at the University of Cambridge, member of the Centre for Quantum Information and Foundations, and Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research focuses on quantum foundations, quantum information science, and quantum cryptography. In 1999 he published the first information-theoretically secure protocols for bit commitment and coin flipping, which were also the first relativistic cryptographic protocols. In addition, he investigated the representation theory of superconformal algebras.

Quantum cryptography Kent is inventor of the field of relativistic quantum cryptography, where security of the cryptographic tasks is guaranteed from the properties of quantum information and from the relativistic physical principle stating that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light (no-signalling). In 1999 he published the first unconditionally secure protocols for bit commitment and strong coin tossing, He has outlined a solution to the quantum reality problem, also called the quantum measurement problem, that is consistent with relativistic quantum theory, proposing that physical reality is described by a randomly chosen configuration of physical quantities (or beables) like the stress–energy tensor, whose sample space is mathematically well defined and respects Lorentzian symmetry. He has discussed the mathematics of risk assessments for global catastrophes.