Hamburg 2016 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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MP: Fachverband Theoretische und Mathematische Grundlagen der Physik

MP 3: Quantenmechanik und Quanteninformation

MP 3.2: Vortrag

Dienstag, 1. März 2016, 17:40–18:00, VMP6 HS B

Quantum theory from questions — •Philipp Höhn¹ and Christopher Wever² — ¹Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria — ²Institute for Theoretical Particle Physics, Karlsruhe, Germany

In contrast to relativity, quantum theory has evaded a commonly accepted apprehension, in part because of the lack of physical statements that fully characterize it. In an attempt to remedy the situation, we summarize a novel reconstruction of the explicit formalism of quantum theory (for arbitrarily many qubits) 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 define S's state as O's ``catalogue of knowledge'' about S; no ontic assumptions are necessary. From the rules, one can derive, among other things, the state spaces, the unitary group, the von Neumann evolution and show that the binary questions correspond to Pauli operators. The reconstruction also offers new structural insights in the form of novel informational charges and informational complementarity relations which define the state spaces and the unitary group. This reconstruction permits a new perspective on quantum theory.