Towards a Quantum Platonism

Jacob A. Barandes

Marek Woszczek

James C. Emerson

The "hidden variables" or "guiding equation" explanation for the measurement of quantum nonlocality (entanglement) effects can be interpreted as instantiation of Platonic information. Because these Bohm-deBroglie principles are already external to the material objects that they theoretically affect, interpreting them as Platonic is feasible. Taking an approach partially suggested by Quantum Information Theory which views quantum phenomena as sometimes observable-measurable information, this thesis defines hidden variables/guiding equation as information. This approach enables us to bridge the divide between the abstract Platonic realm and the physical world. The unobservable quantum wavefunction collapse is interpreted as Platonic instantiation. At each interaction, the wave function for a quantum system collapses. Instantly, Platonic information is instantiated in the system.

Inge Svein Helland

Károly F. Pál, Tamás Vértesi

In this paper we study the Platonic Bell inequalities for all possible dimensions. There are five Platonic solids in three dimensions, but there are also solids with Platonic properties (also known as regular polyhedra) in four and higher dimensions. The concept of Platonic Bell inequalities in the three-dimensional Euclidean space was introduced by Tavakoli and Gisin [Quantum 4, 293 (2020)]. For any three-dimensional Platonic solid, an arrangement of projective measurements is associated where the measurement directions point toward the vertices of the solids. For the higher dimensional regular polyhedra, we use the correspondence of the vertices to the measurements in the abstract Tsirelson space. We give a remarkably simple formula for the quantum violation of all the Platonic Bell inequalities, which we prove to attain the maximum possible quantum violation of the Bell inequalities, i.e. the Tsirelson bound. To construct Bell inequalities with a large number of settings, it is crucial to compute the local bound efficiently. In general, the computation time required to compute the local bound grows exponentially with the number of measurement settings. We find a method to compute the local bound exactly for any bipartite two-outcome Bell inequality, where the dependence becomes polynomial whose degree is the rank of the Bell matrix. To show that this algorithm can be used in practice, we compute the local bound of a 300-setting Platonic Bell inequality based on the halved dodecaplex. In addition, we use a diagonal modification of the original Platonic Bell matrix to increase the ratio of quantum to local bound. In this way, we obtain a four-dimensional 60-setting Platonic Bell inequality based on the halved tetraplex for which the quantum violation exceeds the 2 ratio.

Inge Svein Helland