
A General Quantum Duality for Representations of Groups, with Applications to Quantum Money, Lightning, and Fire
Barak Nehoran, speaking in the Institute for Advanced Study's Computer Science and Discrete Mathematics seminar, presents a duality principle for quantum computation that generalizes a 2020 result by Aaronson, Atia, and Susskind. He argues that implementing a unitary representation of a group is computationally equivalent to performing a Fourier extraction over that group's irreducible representations, and walks through the representation theory and quantum cryptography needed to make sense of the claim, promising no prior background required. The main application is quantum money, the unclonable-but-verifiable quantum states first proposed by Columbia's Stephen Wiesner in 1968, and specifically quantum lightning, a stronger variant that has resisted rigorous construction for years. Nehoran presents what he describes as the first construction of quantum lightning built on a concrete cryptographic assumption rather than ones later shown to be broken. The talk runs long enough to develop the group-theoretic machinery in full before turning to the cryptographic payoff.