Charles H. Bennett

Physicist Charles H. Bennett, an IBM Fellow who has been at IBM for more than 50 years. Most of Bennett’s research has been on the relation between physics and information, and he is known for his breakthroughs in quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation.

Since joining IBM in 1973, he has worked on the physics of information processing, including Maxwell's demon and reversible computation; quantum information and computation theory; and the relation of thermodynamic disequilibrium to the emergence of phenomenological classicality and complexity from quantum laws. In 1984 he and Gilles Brassard of Montreal devised the first and most widely used protocol for quantum cryptography. In 1993, they and coworkers showed that intact quantum states can be transmitted via a combination of classical communication and prior entanglement, a phenomenon called quantum teleportation. 

His public lectures have sought to demystify quantum mechanics, introducing analogies like “the monogamy of entanglement” and “quantum information is like the information in a dream” to help both scientists and lay people overcome the field’s radical weirdness and replace it by a mature quantum intuition.

Bennett has received the Wolf Prize in Physics (2018, shared with Brassard) and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2023, shared with Brassard, David Deutsch, and Peter Shor). The American Physical Society has honored him by awarding every year since 2017 the Rolf Landauer and Charles H. Bennett Award in Quantum Computing.

Bennett has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Brandeis University and a doctorate from Harvard University. He spent two years at Argonne National Laboratory before joining IBM Research.