We recast Selinger's CPM-construction of mixed states completely positive maps [P. Selinger (2007) Dagger compact closed categories and completely positive maps. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Quantum Programming Languages (QPL 2005), Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 170, 139–163. Available from Peter Selinger's homepage] as an axiomatization of maximally mixed states. This axiomatization also guarantees categories of completely positive maps to satisfy the preparation-state agreement axiom of [Coecke, B. (2007) De-linearizing linearity: projective quantum axiomatics from strong compact closure. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Quantum Programming Languages (QPL 2005), Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 170, 49–72. E-print: arXiv:quant-ph/0506134], and admits a physical interpretation in terms of purification of mixed states and CPMs. Internal traces, which are crucial in quantum information theory, are the adjoints to these maximally mixed states.
We recast Selinger's CPM-construction of mixed states completely positive maps [P. Selinger (2007) Dagger compact closed categories and completely positive maps. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Quantum Programming Languages (QPL 2005), Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 170, 139–163. Available from Peter Selinger's homepage] as an axiomatization of maximally mixed states. This axiomatization also guarantees categories of completely positive maps to satisfy the preparation-state agreement axiom of [Coecke, B. (2007) De-linearizing linearity: projective quantum axiomatics from strong compact closure. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Quantum Programming Languages (QPL 2005), Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 170, 49–72. E-print: arXiv:quant-ph/0506134], and admits a physical interpretation in terms of purification of mixed states and CPMs. Internal traces, which are crucial in quantum information theory, are the adjoints to these maximally mixed states.
Monoidal categories have recently been seen to be appropriate structures for establishing abstract axioms for quantum physics. The tensor product in a monoidal category corresponds to the creation of a composite system obtained by joining two independent quantum systems. This correspondence is formalized in the work of Abramsky-Coecke and Selinger. From this point of view, the tensor product in a monoidal category is abstracting the tensor product of Hilbert spaces. The notion of a dagger compact closed category axiomatizes further structure in the Hilbert space category. In particular, the dagger is an abstraction of the familiar Hilbert adjoint. Peter Selinger associates to each dagger compact closed category C its category of completely positive maps, denoted CPM(C). He proves that the resulting category is again a dagger compact closed category. We seek a similar result for tensored †-categories equipped with nuclear ideals. We establish an appropriate notion of completely positive maps in a nuclear ideal. We then define a CPM construction for tensored †-categories equipped with nuclear ideals. Analogous to Selinger's construction, given a nuclear ideal N for a tensored †-category C, our construction yields its category of completely positive maps, CPMN(C). We prove that CPM N(C). is again a tensored †-category. In the process, we also verify that our completely positive maps properly extend Selinger's notion of CPMs. In particular, they preserve nuclear-positive matrices, which are generalizations of von Neumann's positive density operators. As well, we characterize the completely positive maps for the nuclear ideal of Hilbert-Schmidt operators for Hilb and the nuclear ideal of finite relations for LFR. Our construction abstracts the passage from finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces to the category of all Hilbert spaces.
Mixed states are of interest in quantum mechanics for modelling partial information. More recently categorical approaches to linguistics have also exploited the idea of mixed states to describe ambiguity and hyponym / hypernym relationships. In both these application areas the category Rel of sets and binary relations is often used as an alternative model. Selinger's CPM construction provides the setting for mixed states in Hilbert space based categorical quantum mechanics. By analogy, applying the CPM construction to Rel is seen as introducing mixing into a relational setting. We investigate the category CPM(Rel) of completely positive maps in Rel. We show that the states of an object in CPM(Rel) are in bijective correspondence with certain families of graphs. Via map-state duality this then allows us provide a graph theoretic characterization of the morphisms in CPM(Rel). By identifying an appropriate composition operation on graphs, we then show that CPM(Rel) is isomorphic to a category of sets and graphs between them. This isomorphism then leads to a graph based description of the complete join semilattice enriched dagger compact structure of CPM(Rel). These results allow us to reason about CPM(Rel) entirely in terms of graphs. We exploit these techniques in several examples. We give a closed form expression for the number of states of a finite set in CPM(Rel). The pure states are characterized in graph theoretic terms. We also demonstrate the possibly surprising phenomenon of a pure state that can be given as a mixture of two mixed states.
We introduce the CP*-construction on a dagger compact closed category as a generalisation of Selinger's CPM-construction. While the latter takes a dagger compact closed category and forms its category of "abstract matrix algebras" and completely positive maps, the CP*-construction forms its category of "abstract C*-algebras" and completely positive maps. This analogy is justified by the case of finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, where the CP*-construction yields the category of finite-dimensional C*-algebras and completely positive maps. The CP*-construction fully embeds Selinger's CPM-construction in such a way that the objects in the image of the embedding can be thought of as "purely quantum" state spaces. It also embeds the category of classical stochastic maps, whose image consists of "purely classical" state spaces. By allowing classical and quantum data to coexist, this provides elegant abstract notions of preparation, measurement, and more general quantum channels.
Dagger compact closed categories were recently introduced by Abramsky and Coecke, under the name “strongly compact closed categories”, as an axiomatic framework for quantum mechanics. We present a graphical language for dagger compact closed categories, and sketch a proof of its completeness for equational reasoning. We give a general construction, the CPM construction, which associates to each dagger compact closed category its “category of completely positive maps”, and we show that the resulting category is again dagger compact closed. We apply these ideas to Abramsky and Coecke's interpretation of quantum protocols, and to D'Hondt and Panangaden's predicate transformer semantics.
Elaborating on our joint work with Abramsky in [S. Abramsky, B. Coecke, B. (2004) A categorical semantics of quantum protocols. Proceedings of the 19th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LiCS'04), IEEE Computer Science Press. Extended version including proofs at arXiv:quant-ph/0402130, S. Abramsky, B. Coecke, (2005) Abstract physical traces. Theory and Applications of Categories 14, 111–124] we further unravel the linear structure of Hilbert spaces into several constituents. Some prove to be very crucial for particular features of quantum theory while others obstruct the passage to a formalism which is not saturated with physically insignificant global phases. First we show that the bulk of the required linear structure is purely multiplicative, and arises from the strongly compact closed tensor which, besides providing a variety of notions such as scalars, trace, unitarity, self-adjointness and bipartite projectors [S. Abramsky, B. Coecke, B. (2004) A categorical semantics of quantum protocols. Proceedings of the 19th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LiCS'04), IEEE Computer Science Press. Extended version including proofs at arXiv:quant-ph/0402130, S. Abramsky, B. Coecke, (2005) Abstract physical traces. Theory and Applications of Categories 14, 111–124], also provides Hilbert-Schmidt norm, Hilbert-Schmidt inner-product, and in particular, the preparation-state agreement axiom which enables the passage from a formalism of the vector space kind to a rather projective one, as it was intended in the (in)famous Birkhoff & von Neumann paper [G. Birkhoff, J. von Neumann, (1936) The logic of quantum mechanics. Annals of Mathematics 37, 823–843]. Next we consider additive types which distribute over the tensor, from which measurements can be build, and the correctness proofs of the protocols discussed in [S. Abramsky, B. Coecke, (2004) A categorical semantics of quantum protocols. Proceedings of the 19th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LiCS'04), IEEE Computer Science Press. Extended version including proofs at arXiv:quant-ph/0402130] carry over to the resulting weaker setting. A full probabilistic calculus is obtained when the trace is moreover linear and satisfies the diagonal axiom, which brings us to a second main result, characterization of the necessary and sufficient additive structure of a both qualitatively and quantitatively effective categorical quantum formalism without redundant global phases. Along the way we show that if in a category a (additive) monoidal tensor distributes over a strongly compact closed tensor, then this category is always enriched in commutative monoids.
Dagger compact closed categories were studied by Abramsky and Coecke (under the name “strongly compact closed categories”) as an abstract presentation of the category of Hilbert spaces and linear maps, and as a framework in which to carry out the interpretation of quantum protocols. I subsequently showed that dagger compact closed categories can also describe mixed quantum computation, where the morphisms are completely positive maps. I introduced the CPM construction as a way to pass from the pure to the mixed setting. One technical detail of the CPM(C) construction is that it does not preserve biproducts. Therefore, to obtain an interpretation of classical types such as bit=I⊕I, one must work in the free biproduct completion CPM(C)⊕. In this paper, we show that there is another view of classical types, namely as splittings of self-adjoint idempotents on quantum types. We show that all the objects of CPM(C)⊕ arise as such splittings.