Quantum Foundations

Causal reasoning is vital for effective reasoning in science and medicine. In medical diagnosis, for example, a doctor aims to explain a patient’s symptoms by determining the diseases causing them. This is because causal relations---unlike correlations---allow one to reason about the consequences of possible treatments. However, all previous approaches to machine-learning assisted diagnosis, including deep learning and model-based Bayesian approaches, learn by association and do not distinguish correlation from causation. I will show that these approaches systematically lead to incorrect diagnoses. I will outline a new diagnostic algorithm, based on counterfactual inference, which captures the causal aspect of diagnosis overlooked by previous approaches and overcomes these issues. I will additionally describe recent algorithms from my group which can discover causal relations from uncontrolled observational data and show how these can be applied to facilitate effective reasoning in medical settings such as deciding how to treat certain diseases.

A superoscillatory function is a bandlimited function that, on some interval, oscillates faster than the highest frequency component shown in the function's Fourier transform. Superoscillations can be arbitrarily fast and of arbitrarily long duration but come at the expense of requiring a correspondingly large dynamic range. I will review how superoscillatory wave forms can be constructed and I will discuss the unusual behavior of wave functions that superoscillate. For example, they can describe particles that automatically strongly accelerate when passing through a slit. A postselected stream of them represents a ray that cools the slit walls, raising foundational and thermodynamic questions. Superoscillatory wave forms are already being used for practical applications such as spatial resolution beyond the diffraction limit. 

We consider a consistent theory of classical systems coupled to quantum ones. The dynamics is linear in the density matrix, completely positive and trace-preserving. We apply this to construct a theory of classical gravity coupled to quantum field theory. The theory doesn't suffer the pathologies of semi-classical gravity and reduces to Einstein's equations in the appropriate limit. The assumption that gravity is classical necessarily modifies the dynamical laws of quantum mechanics -- the theory must be fundamentally information destroying involving finite sized and stochastic jumps in space-time and in the quantum field. Nonetheless the quantum state of the system can remain pure conditioned on the classical degrees of freedom. The measurement postulate of quantum mechanics is not needed since the interaction of the quantum degrees of freedom with classical space-time necessarily causes collapse of the wave-function. The theory can be regarded as fundamental, or as an effective theory of quantum field theory in curved space where backreaction is consistently accounted for.

Can a relativistic quantum field theory be consistently described as a theory of localizable particles? There are many well-known obstructions to such a description. Here, we trace exactly how such obstructions arise in the regime between nonrelativistic quantum mechanics and relativistic quantum field theory. Perhaps unexpectedly, we find that in the nonrelativistic limit of QFT, there are persisting issues with the localizability of particle states. Related via the Reeh-Schlieder theorem, we also show that the fate of ground state entanglement and the Unruh effect is nontrivial in the nonrelativistic limit.

Weak values are quantities accessed through quantum experiments involving weak measurements and post-selection. It has been shown that ‘anomalous’ weak values (those lying beyond the eigenvalue range of the corresponding operator) defy classical explanation in the sense of requiring contextuality [M. F. Pusey, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 200401, arXiv:1409.1535]. We elaborate on and extend that result in several directions. Firstly, the original theorem requires certain perfect correlations that can never be realised in any actual experiment. Hence, we provide new theorems that allow for a noise-robust experimental verification of contextuality from anomalous weak values. Secondly, the original theorem connects the anomaly to contextuality only in the presence of a whole set of extra operational constraints. Here we clarify the debate surrounding anomalous weak values by showing that these conditions are tight -- if any one of them is dropped, the anomaly can be reproduced classically. Thirdly, whereas the original result required the real part of the weak value to be anomalous, we also give a version for any weak value with nonzero imaginary part. Finally, we show that similar results hold if the weak measurement is performed through qubit pointers, rather than the traditional continuous system. All in all, we provide inequalities for witnessing nonclassicality using experimentally realistic measurements of any anomalous weak value, and clarify what ingredients of the quantum experiment must be missing in any classical model that can reproduce the anomaly.

 In the framework of ontological models, the features of quantum

theory that emerge as inherently nonclassical always involve properties that

are fine tuned, i.e.  properties that hold at the operational level but break at the

ontological level (they only hold for fine tuned values of the ontic parameters). Famous

examples of fine tuned properties are noncontextuality and locality. We here

develop a precise theory-independent mathematical framework for characterizing

operational fine tunings. These are distinct from causal fine tunings — already

introduced by Wood and Spekkens — as they do not involve any assumption

on the underlying causal structure. We show how all the already known examples of

operational fine tunings fit into our framework, we discuss possibly new fine tunings

and we use the framework to shed new light on the relation between nonlocality

and generalized contextuality. The framework is set in the language of functors in category

theory and it aims at unifying the spooky properties of quantum theory as well as

accounting for new ones.

Schur-Weyl duality, arising from tensor-power representations of the unitary group, is a big useful hammer in the quantum information toolbox. This is especially the case for problems which have a full unitary invariance, say, estimating the spectrum of a quantum state from a few copies. Many problems in quantum computing have a smaller symmetry group: the Clifford group. This talk will show how to decompose tensor-power Clifford representations through a Schur-Weyl type construction. Our results are also relevant for the theory of Howe duality between symplectic and orthogonal groups.

Bell inequalities are important tools in contrasting classical and quantum behaviors. To date, most Bell inequalities are linear combinations of statistical correlations between remote parties. Nevertheless, finding the classical and quantum mechanical (Tsirelson) bounds for a given Bell inequality in a general scenario is a difficult task which rarely leads to closed-form solutions. Here we introduce a new class of Bell inequalities based on products of correlators that alleviate these issues. Each such Bell inequality is associated with a non-cooperative coordination game. In the simplest case, Alice and Bob, each  having two random variables, attempt to maximize the area of a rectangle and the rectangle’s area is represented by a certain parameter. This parameter, which is a function of the correlations between their random variables, is shown to be a Bell parameter, i.e. the achievable bound using only classical correlations is strictly smaller than the achievable bound using non-local quantum correlations We continue by generalizing to the case in which Alice and Bob, each having now n random variables, wish to maximize a certain volume in n-dimensional space. We term this parameter a multiplicative Bell parameter and prove its Tsirelson bound. Finally, we investigate the case of local hidden variables and show that for any deterministic strategy of one of the players the Bell parameter is a harmonic function whose maximum approaches the Tsirelson bound as the number of measurement devices increases. Some implications of these results are discussed.

The no-signalling principle, preventing superluminal communication and the consequent logical paradoxes, is typically formulated within the information-theoretic framework in terms of admissible correlations in composite systems. In my talk, I will present its complementary incarnation associated with dynamics of single systems subject to invasive measurements. The `dynamical no-signalling principle' applies to any theory with well defined rules of calculating detection statistics in spacetime. It thus offers a new framework, based on measure theory, for studying ``post-quantum'' theories in spacetime. I will show that, strikingly, the `dynamical no-signalling' principle rules out some of the well know models of quantum wave dynamics.

Randomness is a valuable resource in both classical and quantum networks and we wish to generate desired probability distributions as cheaply as possible. If we are allowed to slightly change the distribution under some tolerance level, we can sometimes greatly reduce the cardinality of the randomness or the dimension of the entanglement. By studying statistical inequalities, we show how to upper bound of the amount of randomness required for any given classical network and tolerance level. We also present a problem we encounter when compressing the randomness in a quantum network.

Canonical quantization is not well suited to quantize gravity, while affine quantization is. For those unfamiliar with affine quantization the talk will include a primer. This procedure is then applied to deal with three nonrenormalizable, field theoretical, problems of increasing difficulty, the last one being general relativity itself.