Roger Colbeck

Profile

Biography

I did my PhD in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Adrian Kent. Following that I held a Junior Research Fellowship at Homerton College, Cambridge, and post-doctoral positions at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (Canada). I joined the Department of Mathematics in 2013.

Departmental roles

• Head of Section, Applied Mathematics 

Research

Overview

Quantum information is a particularly interesting field because it brings together three major disciplines: mathematics, physics and computer science with the broad goal of understanding what power the laws of physics give us for processing information. My research spans many aspects of this, as well as the foundations of quantum mechanics. Often my work connects the two.

Within quantum information theory, I have worked on device-independent quantum cryptography and quantum random number generation, the use of quantum and relativistic protocols for secure computations, new uncertainty relations and constructing circuits for quantum computation.  In foundations, I have done work on the question of whether the world is random and whether there could be theories that improve on the predictions of quantum mechanics and ways to understand causation in quantum theory.

Many of these areas are suitable for PhD projects -- please get in touch if you are interested.

Research group(s)

Mathematical Physics and Quantum Information Research Group

Available PhD research projects

I am principally offering projects in quantum cryptography or random number generation (in particular device-independent protocols) or quantum foundations (e.g. understanding cause in quantum theory). However, I may be willing to take students who wish to look at other aspects of quantum information theory or the foundations of quantum mechanics.

Supervision

Current Research Students

• Rutvij Bhavsar - rvrb500@york.ac.uk
• Shashaank Khanna - sk1808@york.ac.uk
• Kuntal Sengupta - ks1759@york.ac.uk

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Cryptography