Quantum Foundations

Quantum measure theory describes quantum theory as a generalization of a classical stochastic process, which may be fruitful for quantum gravity. I will describe the approach, and show that, in the context of an EPRB setup with two distant experimenters, two alternative experiments, and two outcomes per experiment, any set of no signaling probabilities can be realized, albeit by violating a `strong positivity\' condition.

It is usually expected that nonrelativistic many-body Schroedinger equations emerge from some QFT models in the limit of infinite masses. For instance, from Yukawa\'s QFT, if the initial state contains 2 fermions, we expect to recover a 2-fermion nonrelativistic Schroedinger equation with 2-body Yukawa potential (in the limit of infinite fermion mass). I will give an easy (but still heuristic) derivation of this, based on the analysis of the corresponding Feynman diagrams and on the behaviour of the complete propagators for large spacetime distances. Then, I may outline another possible derivation based on the Schroedinger picture and dressed particles.

A single classical system is characterized by its manifold of states; and to combine several systems, we take the product of manifolds. A single quantum system is characterized by its Hilbert space of states; and to combine several systems, we take the tensor product of Hilbert spaces. But what if we choose to combine an infinite number of systems? A naive attempt to describe such combinations fails, for there is apparently no natural notion of an infinite product of manifolds; nor of an infinite tensor product of Hilbert spaces. But, at least in the quantum case, the situation is not as hopeless as it might appear. We argue that there does indeed exist a natural mathematical framework for combinations of infinite numbers of quantum systems.

We prove that all non-conspiratorial/retro-causal hidden variable theories has to be measurement ordering contextual, i.e. there exists *commuting* operator pair (A,B) and a hidden state \\\\lambda such that the outcome of A depends on whether we measure B before or after. Interestingly this rules out a recent proposal for a psi-epistemic due to Barrett, Hardy, and Spekkens. We also show that the model was in fact partly discovered already by vanFraassen 1973; the only thing missing was giving a probability distribution on the space of ontic states (the hidden variables).

The purpose of this talk is to describe bosonic fields and their Lagrangians in the causal set context. Spin-0 fields are defined to be real-valued functions on a causal set. Gauge fields are viewed as SU(n)-valued functions on the set of pairs of elements of a causal set, and gravity is viewed as the causal relation itself. The purpose of this talk is to come up with expressions for the Lagrangian densities of these fields in such a way that they approximate the Lagrangian densities expected from regular Quantum Field Theory on a differentiable manifold in the special case where the causal set is a random sprinkling of points in the manifold. I will then conjecture that that same expression is appropriate for an arbitrary causal set.

Mutually unbiased bases (MUBs) have attracted a lot of attention the last years. These bases are interesting for their potential use within quantum information processing and when trying to understand quantum state space. A central question is if there exists complete sets of N+1 MUBs in N-dimensional Hilbert space, as these are desired for quantum state tomography. Despite a lot of effort they are only known in prime power dimensions. I will describe in geometrical terms how a complete set of MUBs would sit in the set of density matrices and present a distance between bases–a measure of unbiasedness. Then I will explain the relation between MUBs and Hadamard matrices, and report on a search for MUB-sets in dimension N=6. In this case no sets of more than three MUBs are found, but there are several inequivalent triplets.

Bell\\\'s theorem is commonly understood to show that EPR correlations are not explainable via a local hidden variable theory. But Bell\\\'s theorem assumes that the initial state of the particles is independent of the final detector settings. It has been proposed that this independence assumption might be undermined by a relativistically-allowed form of \\\"backward causation\\\", thereby allowing construction of a local hidden-variable model after all. In this talk, I will show that there is no backward causation model which yields the desired correlations. However, there are other physical scenarios yielding nontrivial nonlocal correlations which violated Bell\\\'s independence assumption. I will present two.

In any attempt to construct a Quantum Theory of Gravity, one has to deal with the fact that Time in Quantum Mechanics appears to be very different from Time in General Relativity. This is the famous (or actually notorious!) \"Problem of Time\", and gives rise to both conceptual and technical problems. The decoherent histories approach to quantum theory, is an alternative formulation of quantum theory specially designed to deal with closed (no-external observer or environment) systems. This approach has been considered particularly promising, in dealing with the problem of time, since it puts space and time in equal footing (unlike standard QM) . This talk develops a particular implementation of the above expectations, i.e. we construct a general set of \"Class Operators\" corresponding to questions that appear to be \"Timeless\" (independent of the parameter time), but correspond to physically interesting questions. This is similar to finding a general enough set of timeless observables, in the evolving constants approach to the problem of time.

We derive a set of Bell inequalities using correlated random variables. Our inequalities are necessary conditions for the existence of a local realistic description of projective measurements on qubits. We analyze our inequalities for the case of two qubits and find that they are equivalent to the well known CHSH inequalities. We also discuss the sufficiency of our inequalities as well as their applicability to more than two qubits.

Several finite dimensional quasi-probability representations of quantum states have been proposed to study various problems in quantum information theory and quantum foundations. These representations are often defined only on restricted dimensions and their physical significance in contexts such as drawing quantum-classical comparisons is limited by the non-uniqueness of the particular representation. Here we show how the mathematical theory of frames provides a unified formalism which accommodates all known quasi-probability representations of finite dimensional quantum systems.

A new microcanonical equilibrium state is introduced for quantum systems with finite-dimensional state spaces. Equilibrium is characterised by a uniform distribution on a level surface of the expectation value of the Hamiltonian. The distinguishing feature of the proposed equilibrium state is that the corresponding density of states is a continuous function of the energy, and hence thermodynamic functions are well defined for finite quantum systems. The density of states, however, is not in general an analytic function. It is demonstrated that generic quantum systems therefore exhibit second-order phase transitions at finite temperatures. The talk is based on work carried out in collaboration with D.W. Hook and L.P. Hughston.

What if the second law of thermodynamics, in the hierarchy of physical laws, were at the same level as the fundamental laws of mechanics, such as the great conservation principles? What if entropy were an intrinsic property of matter at the same level as energy is universally understood to be? What if irreversibility were an intrinsic feature of the microscopic dynamical law of all physical objects, including an individual qubit or qudit? This talk will show how positive answers to these questions need not contradict any of the known results of quantum mechanics. We construct a logically consistent, mathematically sound and definite, physically intriguing, non-relativistic and non-statistical quantum theory, in which the second law of thermodynamics is embedded as a fundamental microscopical law. The theory hinges upon a nonlinear extension of unitary Hamiltonian dynamics which for uncorrelated and noninteracting systems reduces to the usual Schroedinger equation for the zero entropy states, but in general generates a group (not a semi group) of irreversible time evolutions, where the non-Hamiltonian entropy generating term in the evolution equation attracts the state towards the direction of maximal entropy increase. Various examples and features of this highly non-conventional dynamical theory are discussed. References available at http://www.quantumthermodynamics.org/