Talks

The standard perspective on subsystems in quantum theory is a bottom-up, compositional one: one starts with individual "small" systems, viewed as primary, and composes them together to form larger systems. The top-down, decompositional perspective goes the other way, starting with a "large" system and asking what it means to partition it into smaller parts. In this talk, I will 1/ argue that the adoption of the top-down perspective is the key to progress in several current areas of foundational research; and 2/ present an integrated mathematical framework for partitions into three or more subsystems, using sub-C* algebras. Concerning the first item, I will explain how the top-down perspective becomes crucial whenever the way in which a quantum system is partitioned into smaller subsystems is not unique, but might depend on the physical situation at hand. I will display how that precise feature lies at the heart of a flurry of current hot foundational topics, such as quantum causal models, Wigner's friend scenarios, superselection rules, quantum reference frames, and debates over the implementability of the quantum switch. Concerning the second item, I will argue that partitions in (finite-dimensional) quantum theory can be naturally pinned down using sub-C* algebras. Building on simple illustrative examples, I will discuss the often-overlooked existence of non-factor C*-algebras, and how it leads to numerous subtleties -- in particular a generic failure of local tomography. I will introduce a sound framework for quantum partitions that overcomes these challenges; it is the first top-down framework that allows to consider three or more subsystems. Finally, as a display of this framework's technical power, I will briefly present how its application to quantum causal modelling unlocked the proof that all 1D quantum cellular automata admit causal decompositions.

(This is joint work with Octave Mestoudjian and Pablo Arrighi. This talk is complementary to my Causalworlds 2024 presentation, which will focus on the issue of causal decompositions.)

Violations of Bell’s inequality have been studied for spin-1/2 systems in much detail. Turns out that one can show Bell violation for systems that are expressed in terms of continuous variables such as position and momentum. The most ubiquitous examples of such systems are Gaussian states, notably the two-mode squeezed vacuum state. I will talk about how one can quantify violations of local realism in such states. I will discuss the dependence of Bell violation on temperature as well as the result that entanglement is not a monotonic function of Bell's inequality.

What types of differences among causal structures with latent variables are impossible to distinguish by statistical data obtained by probing each visible variable? If the probing scheme is simply passive observation, then it is well-known that many different causal structures can realize the same joint probability distributions. Even for the simplest case of two visible variables, for instance, one cannot distinguish between causal influence of one variable on the other and the two variables sharing a latent common cause. However, it is possible to distinguish between these two causal structures if we have recourse to more powerful probing schemes, such as the possibility of intervening on one of the variables and observing the other. Herein, we address the question of which causal structures remain indistinguishable even given the most informative types of probing schemes on the visible variables. We find that two causal structures remain indistinguishable if and only if they are both associated with the same mDAG structure (as defined by Evans (2016)). We also consider the question of when one causal structure dominates another in the sense that it can realize all of the joint probability distributions that can be realized by the other using a given probing scheme. (Equivalence of causal structures is the special case of mutual dominance.) Finally, we investigate to what extent one can weaken the probing schemes implemented on the visible variables and still have the same discrimination power as a maximally informative probing scheme.