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A broken time-reversal symmetry, i.e. broken detailed balance, is central to non-equilibrium physics and is a prerequisite for life. However, it turns out to be quite challenging to unambiguously define and quantify time-reversal symmetry…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-03-20 Cai Dieball , Aljaž Godec

Quantum mechanics allows for coherent control over the order in which different processes take place on a target system, giving rise to a new feature known as indefinite causal order. Indefinite causal order provides a resource for quantum…

There exists a stark tension among different formulations of quantum theory as some are inherently time-symmetric while others are time-asymmetric. This tension is crisply captured when considering physical theories as theories of…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-11-12 John H. Selby , Maria E. Stasinou , Stefano Gogioso , Bob Coecke

While the standard formulation of quantum theory assumes a fixed background causal structure, one can relax this assumption within the so-called process matrix framework. Remarkably, some processes, termed causally nonseparable, are…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-08-29 Hippolyte Dourdent , Alastair A. Abbott , Nicolas Brunner , Ivan Šupić , Cyril Branciard

This paper studies causal discovery in irregularly sampled time series-a key challenge in risk-sensitive domains like finance, healthcare, and climate science, where missing data and inconsistent sampling frequencies distort causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Weihong Li , Baohong Li , Anpeng Wu , Zhihan Li , Ming Ma , Keting Yin , Kun Kuang

Modern approaches to causal modeling give a central role to interventions, which require the active input of an observer and introduces an explicit `causal arrow of time'. Causal models typically adopt a mechanistic interpretation,…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-08-23 Jacques Pienaar

In a scenario where two parties share, act on and exchange some physical resource, the assumption that the parties' actions are ordered according to a definite causal structure yields constraints on the possible correlations that can be…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2015-12-25 Cyril Branciard , Mateus Araújo , Adrien Feix , Fabio Costa , Časlav Brukner

Time reversal symmetry is studied in a space with noncommutativity of coordinates and noncommutativity of momenta of canonical type. The circular motion is examined as an apparent example of time reversal symmetry breaking in the space. On…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-01-23 Kh. P. Gnatenko , M. I. Samar , V. M. Tkachuk

One of the most fundamental open problems in physics is the unification of general relativity and quantum theory to a theory of quantum gravity. An aspect that might become relevant in such a theory is that the dynamical nature of causal…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-03-14 Veronika Baumann , Marius Krumm , Philippe Allard Guérin , Časlav Brukner

Time-reversal symmetry is of fundamental importance to physics. In the classical theory of time-reversal symmetry, the time-reversal symmetry of a quantum system is described by an anti-unitary operator, which is known as the time-reversal…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-02 Ce Wang

We present a categorical construction for modelling causal structures within a general class of process theories that include the theory of classical probabilistic processes as well as quantum theory. Unlike prior constructions within…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-06-22 Aleks Kissinger , Sander Uijlen

Recent frameworks describing quantum mechanics in the absence of a global causal order admit the existence of causally indefinite processes, where it is impossible to ascribe causal order for events A and B. These frameworks even allow for…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-05-11 Simon Milz , Dominic Jurkschat , Felix A. Pollock , Kavan Modi

We provide an analysis of indefinite causal orders in relativistic quantum mechanics based on the electron-positron picture of Feynman involving negative energy electrons moving backward in time. We show that genuine implementations of the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-03-03 Aurélien Drezet

Can the direction of time and the causal structure of space-time be inferred from operational principles? Causal models and tensor networks offer complementary perspectives: the former encodes cause-effect relations via directed graphs,…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-16 Carla Ferradini , Giulia Mazzola , V. Vilasini

We consider devices with two inputs and two outputs, Alice and Bob each having access to one input and one output. To such a device we associate time-reverses by exchanging the roles of the inputs and the outputs. We find that there are…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2011-08-11 Bob Coecke , Raymond Lal

Formalisms for higher order quantum processes provide a theoretical formalisation of quantum processes where the order of agents' operations need not be definite and acyclic, but may be subject to quantum superpositions. This has led to the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-08-07 Matthias Salzger , V. Vilasini

We identify a new class of non-Hermitian causal processes that produce statistically significant temporal correlations invisible to conventional spectral methods. Using a generative model with a strictly causal memory kernel, we demonstrate…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-04-01 Mario J. Pinheiro

In the last few years, there has been increasing interest in quantum processes with indefinite causal order. Process matrices are a convenient framework to study such processes. Ref. [1] defines higher order transformations from process…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2020-09-22 Esteban Castro-Ruiz , Flaminia Giacomini , Časlav Brukner

Following on from the notion of (first-order) causality, which generalises the notion of being tracepreserving from CP-maps to abstract processes, we give a characterization for the most general kind of map which sends causal processes to…

Other Computer Science · Computer Science 2017-01-04 Aleks Kissinger , Sander Uijlen

A symmetric monoidal category naturally arises as the mathematical structure that organizes physical systems, processes, and composition thereof, both sequentially and in parallel. This structure admits a purely graphical calculus. This…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2015-05-30 Bob Coecke , Raymond Lal