Foundations of Quantum Mechanics

From a brief discussion of how to generalise Reichenbach’s Principle of the Common Cause to the case of quantum systems, I will develop a formalism to describe any set of quantum systems that have specified causal relationships between them. This formalism is the nearest quantum analogue to the classical causal models of Judea Pearl and others. At the heart of the classical formalism lies the idea that facts about causal structure enforce constraints on probability distributions in the form of conditional independences. I will describe a quantum analogue of this idea, which leads to a quantum version of the three rules of Pearl’s do-calculus. If time, I will end with some more speculative remarks concerning the significance of the work for the foundations of quantum theory.

I give further details on a unification of the foundations of operational quantum theory with those of quantum field theory, coming out of a program that is also known as the positive formalism. I will discuss status and challenges of this program, focusing on the central new concept of local quantum operation. Among the conceptual challenges I want to highlight the question of causality. How do we know that future choices of measurement settings do not influence present measurement results? Should we enforce this, as in the standard formulation of quantum theory? Should this "emerge" from a fundamental theory? Does this question even make sense in a context without a fixed notion of time, such as quantum gravity? With a heavy dose of speculation (put also grounded in very concrete evidence) I find that fermionic theories might play an essential role.

In this status report on current work in progress, I will sketch a generalization of the temporal type theory introduced by Schultz and Spivak to a logic of space and spacetime. If one writes down a definition of probability space within this logic, one conjecturally obtains a notion whose semantics is precisely that of a Euclidean quantum field. I will sketch how to use the logic to reason about probabilities of events involving fields, sketch the relation to AQFT, and attempt to formulate the DLR equations within the logic. Joint work with David Spivak

To identify which principles characterise quantum correlations, it is essential to understand in which sense this set of correlations differs from that of almost quantum correlations. We solve this problem by invoking the so-called no-restriction hypothesis, an explicit and natural axiom in many reconstructions of quantum theory stating that the set of possible measurements is the dual of the set of states. We prove that, contrary to quantum correlations, no generalised probabilistic theory satisfying the no-restriction hypothesis is able to reproduce the set of almost quantum correlations. Therefore, any theory whose correlations are exactly, or very close to, the almost quantum correlations necessarily requires a rule limiting the possible measurements. Our results suggest that the no-restriction hypothesis may play a fundamental role in singling out the set of quantum correlations among other non-signalling ones.

The device-independent approach to physics is one where conclusions are drawn directly and solely from the observed correlations between measurement outcomes. This operational approach to physics arose as a byproduct of Bell's seminal work to distinguish quantum correlations from the set of correlations allowed by locally-causal theories. In practice, since one can only perform a finite number of experimental trials, deciding whether an empirical observation is compatible with some class of physical theories will have to be carried out via the task of hypothesis testing. In this talk, I will review some recent progress on this task based on the prediction-based-ratio method and discuss how it may allow us to falsify, in principle, other classes of physical theories, such as those constrained only by the nonsignaling principle, and those that are constrained to produce the so-called "almost-quantum" set of correlations. As an application, I demonstrate how this method allows us to unveil the apparent violation of the nonsignaling conditions in certain experimental data collected in a Bell test. The lesson learned from this observation will be briefly discussed.

The past decade or so has produced a handful of derivations, or reconstructions, of finite-dimensional quantum mechanics from various packages of operational and/or information-theoretic principles. I will present a selection of these principles --- including symmetry postulates, dilational assumptions, and versions of Hardy's subspace axiom --- in a common framework, and indicate several ways, some familiar and some new, in which these can be combined to yield either standard complex QM (with or without SSRs) or broader theories embracing formally real Jordan algebras.

Quantum foundations and (quantum) gravity are usually considered independently. However, I will demonstrate by means of quantum reference systems how tools and perspectives from quantum gravity can help to solve problems in quantum foundations and, conversely, how quantum foundation perspectives can be useful to constrain spacetime structures. First, I will show how one can derive transformations between quantum reference frames from a gravity inspired symmetry (essentially Mach’s) principle. This principle enforces a perspective neutral theory in which choosing the perspective of a specific frame becomes a choice of gauge and all physical information is relational. This setting enables one to derive and generalize, from first principles, frame transformations that have been proposed earlier in the foundations literature. Moreover, the framework extends to the relational paradigm of dynamics, familiar from quantum gravity, and thereby provides a unifying method for changes of perspective in the quantum theory, incl. changes of both spatial and temporal quantum reference systems. Subsequently, I will take a quantum information inspired perspective on frame synchronization and transformations. Without presupposing specific spacetime structure, I will exhibit how the Lorentz group follows from operational conditions on quantum communication, exemplifying how quantum information protocols can constrain the spacetime structures in which they are feasible.

I will explain the special requirements that observables have to satisfy in quantum gravity and how this affects deeply the notion of time. I will furthermore explore how the search for observables in classical gravity can inform the construction of a quantum theory of gravity.

In a large medical trial, if one obtained a ridiculously small p-value like 10^-12, one would typically move from a plain hypothesis test to trying to estimate the parameters of the effect. For example, one might try to estimate the optimal dosage of a drug or the optimal length of a course of treatment. Tests of Bell and noncontextuality inequalities are hypotheses tests, and typical p-values are much lower than this, e.g. 12-sigma effects are not unheard of and a 7-sigma violation already corresponds to a p-value of about 10^-12. Why then, in quantum foundations, are we still obsessed with proposing and testing new inequalities rather than trying to estimate the parameters of the effect from the experimental data? Here, we will try to do this for preparation contextuality, but will also make some related comments on recent loophole-free Bell inequality tests. We introduce two measures of preparation contextuality: the maximal overlap and the preparation contextuality fraction. The latter is linearly related to the degree of violation of a preparation noncontextuality inequality, so can be estimated from experimental data. Although the measures are different in general, they can be equal for proofs of preparation contextuality that have sufficient symmetry, such as the timelike analogue of the CHSH scenario. We give the value of these measures for this scenario. Using our result, we can consider pairty-epsilon multiplexing, Alice must try to communicate two bits to Bob so that he can choose to determine either of them with high probability, but where Alice must ensure that Bob cannot guess the parity of the bits with probability greater than 1/2 + epsilon, and determine the range of epislon for which there is still an advantage in preparation contextual theories. If time permits, I will make some brief comments on how to robustify experimental tests of this result. joint work with Eric Freda and David Schmid

Certain nonlocal games exhibiting quantum advantage, such as the quantum graph homomorphism and isomorphism games, have composable quantum strategies which are naturally interpreted as structure-preserving functions between finite sets. We propose a natural compositional framework for noncommutative finite set theory in which these quantum strategies appear naturally, and which connects nonlocal games with recent work on compact quantum groups. We apply Morita-theoretical machinery within this framework to characterise, classify, and construct quantum strategies for the graph isomorphism game. This is joint work with Benjamin Musto and David Reutter, based on the papers 1711.07945 and 1801.09705.