About The Speaker

Dr. Bergou is Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Prof. Bergou's research interests are in theoretical quantum optics and quantum information science with an eye on foundations. He is Fellow of the American Physical Society and Optica (formerly Optical Society of America). Current research activities include broadcasting of quantum states with applications in various quantum information protocols, linear optical implementations of quantum networks, and quantitative complementarity relations. An underlying theme over the years is the discrimination of quantum states which is a ubiquitous task in many different quantum communication and quantum computation schemes.

Event Details

I’ll briefly review the now 100-year-old history of wave-particle duality, which started with the famous Einstein-Bohr debate gradually evolved into a full complementarity relation. Wave-like and particle-like behavior have their classical analogs. We have shown that besides these two classical realities there is a genuine quantum reality: entanglement, which is the most important resource for many applications. These three realities add up to a complete complementarity relation, now not a duality but a triality relation, and fully exhaust the information content of a quantum state. I’ll discuss how much of this relation is intrinsic to the quantum state and how much is measurement related.