Related papers: Informational derivation of Quantum Theory
In this paper we derive the complex Hilbert space formalism of quantum theory from four simple information theoretic axioms. It is shown that quantum theory is the only non classical probabilistic theory satisfying the following axioms:…
After more than a century since its birth, Quantum Theory still eludes our understanding. If asked to describe it, we have to resort to abstract and ad hoc principles about complex Hilbert spaces. How is it possible that a fundamental…
Quantum theory was discovered in an adventurous way, under the urge to solve puzzles-like the spectrum of the blackbody radiation-that haunted the physics community at the beginning of the 20th century. It soon became clear, though, that…
The usual formulation of quantum theory is rather abstract. In recent work I have shown that we can, nevertheless, obtain quantum theory from five reasonable axioms. Four of these axioms are obviously consistent with both classical…
The usual formulation of quantum theory is based on rather obscure axioms (employing complex Hilbert spaces, Hermitean operators, and the trace rule for calculating probabilities). In this paper it is shown that quantum theory can be…
Why are the laws of physics formulated in terms of complex Hilbert spaces? Are there natural and consistent modifications of quantum theory that could be tested experimentally? This book chapter gives a self-contained and accessible summary…
Quantum theory makes the most accurate empirical predictions and yet it lacks simple, comprehensible physical principles from which the theory can be uniquely derived. A broad class of probabilistic theories exist which all share some…
Quantum theory is usually formulated in terms of abstract mathematical postulates, involving Hilbert spaces, state vectors, and unitary operators. In this work, we show that the full formalism of quantum theory can instead be derived from…
Does information play a significant role in the foundations of physics? Information is the abstraction that allows us to refer to the states of systems when we choose to ignore the systems themselves. This is only possible in very…
In this paper and a companion paper, we attempt to systematically investigate the possibility that the concept of information may enable a derivation of the quantum formalism from a set of physically comprehensible postulates. To do so, we…
I review some recent advances in foundational research at Pavia QUIT group. The general idea is that there is only Quantum Theory without quantization rules, and the whole Physics---including space-time and relativity--is emergent from the…
We give a condensed and accessible summary of a recent derivation of quantum theory from information-theoretic principles, and use it to study the consequences of this and other reconstructions for our conceptual understanding of the…
We reconstruct finite-dimensional quantum theory with superselection rules, which can describe hybrid quantum-classical systems, from four purely operational postulates: symmetric sharpness, complete mixing, filtering, and local equality.…
We review a recent approach to the foundations of quantum mechanics inspired by quantum information theory. The approach is based on a general framework, which allows one to address a large class of physical theories which share basic…
Information-theoretic derivations of the formalism of quantum theory have recently attracted much attention. We analyze the axioms underlying a few such derivations and propose a conceptual framework in which, by combining several…
There has been a body of works deriving the complex Hilbert space structure of quantum theory from axioms/principles/postulates to deepen our understanding about quantum theory and to reveal ways to go beyond it to resolve foundational…
Quantum theory combines density matrices, Born probabilities, tensor-product composites, positive-operator-valued measures (POVMs), and quantum channels. In a finite-dimensional causal operational theory, we prove that two postulates…
We reconstruct the explicit formalism of qubit quantum theory from elementary rules on an observer's information acquisition. Our approach is purely operational: we consider an observer O interrogating a system S with binary questions and…
The rather unintuitive nature of quantum theory has led numerous people to develop sets of (physically motivated) principles that can be used to derive quantum mechanics from the ground up, in order to better understand where the structure…
For many-particle systems, quantum information in base n can be defined by partitioning the set of states according to the outcomes of n-ary (joint) observables. Thereby, k particles can carry k nits. With regards to the randomness of…