Related papers: Energetic Causal Sets
A new approach to quantum gravity is described which joins the loop representation formulation of the canonical theory to the causal set formulation of the path integral. The theory assigns quantum amplitudes to special classes of causal…
One of the key ways in which quantum mechanics differs from relativity is that it requires a fixed background reference frame for spacetime. In fact, this appears to be one of the main conceptual obstacles to uniting the two theories.…
Quantum theory is a probabilistic theory with fixed causal structure. General relativity is a deterministic theory but where the causal structure is dynamic. It is reasonable to expect that quantum gravity will be a probabilistic theory…
We show that the statistics of electron transfer in a coherent quantum point contact driven by an arbitrary time-dependent voltage is composed of elementary events of two kinds: unidirectional one-electron transfers determining the average…
How should one define thermodynamic quantities (internal energy, work, heat, etc.) for quantum systems coupled to their environments strongly? We examine three (classically equivalent) definitions of a quantum system's internal energy under…
Correlations between spacelike separated measurements on entangled quantum systems are stronger than any classical correlations and are at the heart of numerous quantum technologies. In practice, however, spacelike separation is often not…
This article begins by reviewing the causal set approach in discrete quantum gravity. In our version of this approach a special role is played by covariant causal sets which we call $c$-causets. The importance of $c$-causets is that they…
We introduce a framework to study the emergence of time and causal structure in quantum many-body systems. In doing so, we consider quantum states which encode spacetime dynamics, and develop information theoretic tools to extract the…
Explaining observations in terms of causes and effects is central to all of empirical science. Correlations between entangled quantum particles, however, seem to defy such an explanation. To recover a causal picture in this case, some of…
Structural Equation Models (SEM) are the standard approach to representing causal dependencies between variables in causal models. In this paper we propose a new interpretation of SEMs when reasoning about Actual Causality, in which SEMs…
The theory of causal fermion systems is a new physical theory which aims to describe a fundamental level of physical reality. Its mathematical core is the causal action principle. In this thesis, we develop a formalism which connects the…
Process matrices are a framework to model causal relations in the absence of a well-defined acyclic causal order. The framework is very general and does not even assume the existence of a background spacetime. As a result, it is an open…
Energy-time uncertainty plays an important role in quantum foundations and technologies, and it was even discussed by the founders of quantum mechanics. However, standard approaches (e.g., Robertson's uncertainty relation) do not apply to…
I develop Rafael D. Sorkin's proposal that a partially ordered process of the birth of spacetime atoms in causal set quantum gravity provides an objective physical correlate of our perception of time passing. I argue that one cannot have a…
General Relativity traces the evolution of our Universe back to a Big Bang singularity. To probe physics before the singularity -- if indeed there is a ``before'' -- we must turn to quantum gravity. The Causal Set approach to quantum…
We introduce the idea of weakly coherent collisional models, where the elements of an environment interacting with a system of interest are prepared in states that are approximately thermal, but have an amount of coherence proportional to a…
Quantum causality is an emerging field of study which has the potential to greatly advance our understanding of quantum systems. In this paper, we put forth a theoretical framework for merging quantum information science and causal…
Causal quantum theory assumes that measurements or collapses are well-defined physical processes, localised in space-time, and never give perfectly reliable outcomes and that the outcome of one measurement only influences the outcomes of…
In this thesis, we focus on the energetic analysis within autonomous quantum systems. To this aim, we propose a novel and general formalism for a dynamic description of the energy exchanges between interacting subsystems. From the Schmidt…
Quantum physics is a linear theory, so it is somewhat puzzling that it can underlie very complex systems such as digital computers and life. This paper investigates how this is possible. Physically, such complex systems are necessarily…