Antonio Acín is an ICREA Research Professor at ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences. He has a degree in Physics from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) and in Telecommunication Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. He got his PhD in Theoretical Physics in 2001 from the UB. After a post-doctoral stay in Geneva, in the group of Prof. Gisin (GAP-Optique), he joined ICFO in 2003. At ICFO, Acín leads the Quantum Information Theory group. His research has been awarded with 3 grants from the European Research Council: 1 Starting, 1 Proof of Concept and 1 Consolidator Grant, the latter starting in 2014. He also received an AXA Chair in Quantum Information Science in 2016.
It is usually said that quantum physics is random. But, what does this exactly mean? We show how randomness in quantum physics follows as a consequence of the violation of Bell inequalities. Then, we move from foundations to applications and discuss how this property can be exploited to design novel quantum cryptography protocols for randomness generation and secure key distribution. These protocols are said to be device independent, in the sense that to prove their security one only needs the observation of Bell inequality violation but no assumptions on the devices used to implement the protocol. From a general perspective, the device-independent approach provides a new approach for quantum cryptography in which devices can simply be seen as quantum black boxes processing classical information and security can be certified solely by the observed statistics.