English

Kindergarten Quantum Mechanics

Quantum Physics 2016-09-08 v1 Category Theory

Abstract

These lecture notes survey some joint work with Samson Abramsky as it was presented by me at several conferences in the summer of 2005. It concerns `doing quantum mechanics using only pictures of lines, squares, triangles and diamonds'. This picture calculus can be seen as a very substantial extension of Dirac's notation, and has a purely algebraic counterpart in terms of so-called Strongly Compact Closed Categories (introduced by Abramsky and I in quant-ph/0402130 and [4]) which subsumes my Logic of Entanglement quant-ph/0402014. For a survey on the `what', the `why' and the `hows' I refer to a previous set of lecture notes quant-ph/0506132. In a last section we provide some pointers to the body of technical literature on the subject.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0510032,
  title  = {Kindergarten Quantum Mechanics},
  author = {Bob Coecke},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0510032},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

Lecture notes of invited talks at Quantum Information, Computation & Logic (Perimeter Institute), QTRF-III (Vaxjo), & Google (Silicon Valley) & Kestrel Institute (Silicon Valley). Contains 68 pictures in collor (but ok to be printed in black and white), 18 pages. To appear in the Proceedings of QTRF-III (AIP proceedings)