For over a century, we have sought to understand the abstract formulation of quantum theory from more convincing physical arguments, and this is one of the most enticing scientific challenges of recent times: to derive quantum theory from simple physical principles. There are various ideas on how to approach this, and at least two different approaches to the problem stand out. The first consists of assuming general probabilistic theories that allow probability distributions more general than those that arise in quantum theory, with the goal of finding principles that select quantum theory from this range of possible theories, reconstructing quantum theory as a purely operational probabilistic theory that follows from certain sets of axioms. Although successful, this approach does not completely resolve the problem. Another approach goes in a different direction. Instead of attempting to reconstruct quantum theory as a whole, the focus is on understanding which physical principles explain two of the most peculiar aspects of quantum theory: nonlocality and contextuality, using a device-independent approach. This is one of the key questions we aim to investigate with this masters project: what are the physical principles that explain nonlocality and contextuality in quantum systems?
For over a century, we have sought to understand the abstract formulation of quantum theory from more convincing physical arguments, and this is one of the most enticing scientific challenges of recent times: to derive quantum theory from simple physical principles. There are various ideas on how to approach this, and at least two different approaches to the problem stand out. The first consists of assuming general probabilistic theories that allow probability distributions more general than those that arise in quantum theory, with the goal of finding principles that select quantum theory from this range of possible theories, reconstructing quantum theory as a purely operational probabilistic theory that follows from certain sets of axioms. Although successful, this approach does not completely resolve the problem. Another approach goes in a different direction. Instead of attempting to reconstruct quantum theory as a whole, the focus is on understanding which physical principles explain two of the most peculiar aspects of quantum theory: nonlocality and contextuality, using a device-independent approach. This is one of the key questions we aim to investigate with this masters project: what are the physical principles that explain nonlocality and contextuality in quantum systems?
Quantum mechanics was developed in the early 20th century as a computational algorithm to organize and predict the strange results of a wide variety of experiments involving the microscopic world (molecules, atoms, elementary particles), which appeared random but had a predictable probabilistic distribution. Despite its overwhelming success, the conceptual foundations of this algorithm remain unclear and extremely controversial. How can we connect the microscopic world described by quantum mechanics with the macroscopic world of our daily experience? What is the role of observers in this connection? Why don't strange quantum phenomena occur on macroscopic scales? How can we explain the nonlocal nature of quantum phenomena? In this article I will present some attempts to answer these and other basic questions, which constitute different theories with completely different worldviews, commenting on their strengths and weaknesses. We will conclude that quantum theory is still under construction, as there is no consensual formulation. Its development is a fundamental problem in contemporary physics, and in thought in general.
The field of quantum foundations seeks to answer questions such as: What do the elements of the mathematical formalism of quantum theory represent? From what physical principles can the formalism be derived? What are the precise ways in which a quantum world differs from a classical world and other possible worlds? These lectures will cover some important foundational topics which touch upon these questions, in particular, operational and realist interpretations of the formalism, the quantum measurement problem, nonlocality and contextuality.
In the past century, experimental discoveries have witnessed phenomena in Nature which challenge our everyday classical intuition. In order to explain these facts, quantum theory was developed, which so far has been able to reproduce the observed results. However, I believe that our understanding of quantum mechanics can be significantly improved by the search for an operational meaning behind its mathematical formulation, which would help to identify the limitations and possibilities of the theory for information processing. An intriguing property of quantum theory is its intrinsic randomness. Indeed, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in 1935 questioned the completeness of quantum theory. They argued the possibility of the existence of a complete theory where variables to which we have not access determine the behaviour of physical systems, and the randomness observed in quantum mechanics is then due to our ignorance of these variables. These hidden variables theories, however, were proved not to be enough for explaining the predictions of quantum theory, as shown in the no-go theorems by Bell on quantum-nonlocality and by Kochen and Specker on quantum-contextuality. In the past decades, many experiments have corroborated the nonlocal and contextual character of Nature. However, no intuition behind these phenomena has been found, in particular about what limits their strength. In fact, special relativity alone would allow for phenomena which are more nonlocal than what quantum theory allows. Hence, much effort has been devoted to find the physical properties of quantum theory that restricts these phenomena. In this thesis, we study the constraints that arise on nonlocal and contextual phenomena when a certain exclusiveness structure compatible with quantum theory is imposed in the space of events. Here, an event denotes the situation where an outcome is obtained given that a measurement is performed on the physical system. Regarding nonlocality, we introduce a notion of orthogonality that states that events involving different outcomes of the same local measurement are exclusive, and construct constraints that the correlations among observers should satisfy. We denote this by Local Orthogonality principle (LO), which is the first intrinsically multipartite principle for bounding quantum correlations. We prove that LO identifies the supra-quantum character of some bipartite and multipartite correlations, and gets close to the quantum boundary. When studying contextuality, the same abstract event may correspond to outcomes of different measurements, which introduces a non-trivial structure in the space of events. For its study, we develop a general formalism for contextuality scenarios in the spirit of the recent approach by Cabello, Severini and Winter. In our framework, nonlocality arises as a particular case of contextuality, which allows us to study a generalization of LO. Both in nonlocality and contextuality, we find close connections to problems in combinatorics and hence use graph-theoretical tools for studying correlations. Finally, this thesis also studies the detection of nonlocal correlations. Most results on quantum nonlocality focus on few particles' experiments, while less is known about the detection of quantum nonlocality in many-body systems. Standard many-body observables involve correlations among few particles, while there is still no multipartite Bell inequality to test nonlocality merely from these data. In this thesis, we provide the first proposal for nonlocality detection in many-body systems using two-body correlations. We construct families of Bell inequalities from two-body correlators, which can detect nonlocality for systems with large number of constituents. In addition, we prove violations by systems which are relevant in nuclear and atomic physics, and show how to test these inequalities by measuring global spin components, hence opening the problem to experimental realizations.
Recently, many simple principles have been proposed that can explain quantum limitations on possible sets of experimental probabilities in nonlocality and contextuality experiments. However, few implications between these principles are known. Here it is shown that the lack of irreducible third-order interference (a generalization of the idea that no probabilistic interference remains unaccounted for once we have taken into account interference between pairs of slits in a n-sit experiment) implies the principle known as the E principle or consistent exclusivity (that, if each pair of a set of experimental outcomes are exclusive alternatives in some measurement, then their probabilities are consistent with the existence of a further measurement in which they are all exclusive). This is a step towards a more unified understanding of quantum nonlocality and contextuality, which promises to allow derivations of important results from minimal, easily grasped assumptions. As one example, this result implies that lack of third-order interference bounds violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt-Bell inequality to 2.883.
Este trabalho investiga aspectos fundamentais da teoria quântica. Começamos estabelecendo um formalismo independente de teoria para o estudo de teorias físicas, inspirado pelas chamadas teorias probabilísticas generalizadas (GPTs). Nossa abordagem diverge das GPTs tanto em termos de conceitos primitivos quanto na forma como as teorias físicas são compreendidas. Consideramos observável como conceito primitivo e entendemos teorias como formalismos nos quais leis físicas ou empíricas - expressões matemáticas relacionando quantidades físicas que podem ser mensuradas em conjunto - podem ser formuladas. Além dos observáveis, nosso formalismo inclui estados e um mecanismo de atualização de estados como conceitos primitivos. Estados atribuem probabilidades a proposições sobre medições subsequentes de quantidades físicas, enquanto a atualização de estado reconstrói estados para garantir a veracidade de tais proposições. Assim como nas GPTs, nossa análise é restrita a quantidades com um número finito de valores possíveis. Sistemas quânticos de dimensão finita estão dentro do escopo do nosso formalismo. Demonstramos que a estrutura algébrica da mecânica quântica emerge localmente a partir das condições de consistência que fundamentam nossa definição independente de teoria de sistema físico, onde \"localmente\" se refere a aspectos da álgebra (parcial) de observáveis que não envolvem operações entre operadores incompatíveis. Especificamente, mostramos que observáveis possuem norma e espectro; que existe uma relação de compatibilidade para observáveis, juntamente com operações algébricas entre aqueles que são compatíveis; projeções existem e formam um conjunto parcialmente ordenado com álgebras Booleanas locais; observáveis compatíveis dois a dois estão contidos em álgebras de Banach comutativas geradas por um único observável; estados definem funcionais parcialmente lineares no conjunto de observáveis; observáveis admitem decomposição espectral, entre outros. Esses resultados contribuem para a importante linha de pesquisa centrada em derivar o formalismo quântico a partir de suposições simples. Além disso, eles destacam uma diferença fundamental entre nosso formalismo e as GPTs, já que estas últimas são conhecidas por comumente não incluírem operações algébricas e projetores. A emergência local da estrutura algébrica da mecânica quântica tem implicações significativas para o problema das correlações quânticas, ou seja, o problema de se identificar princípios que expliquem as correlações produzidas por sistemas quânticos. Essa estrutura local nos permite provar que princípios importantes que governam as correlações quânticas, como a não-perturbatividade, a não-sinalização, o princípio de Specker, o princípio da exclusividade e o princípio da ortogonalidade local, são inerentemente satisfeitos em nosso formalismo. Consequentemente, nenhuma teoria dentro do escopo da nossa descrição pode violá-los, e as correlações por elas produzidas não podem estar consideravelmente distantes do chamado conjunto quântico. Exemplos notáveis de correlações pós-quânticas, como caixas PR e correlações quase-quânticas, são automaticamente excluídos. Concluímos nosso trabalho abordando o problema das variáveis ocultas. Provamos um teorema de impossibilidade para modelos de variáveis ocultas com base em uma única condição de consistência: o modelo deve atualizar estados via probabilidade condicional, o que, conforme argumentamos, segue de nossa descrição do mecanismo de atualização de estados. Este teorema estabelece uma ligação direta entre a incompatibilidade e a ausência de variáveis ocultas, mostrando que modelos de variáveis ocultas que atualizam estados existem se, e somente se, os observáveis em questão forem dois a dois compatíveis. Com base nisso, analisamos afirmações de cunho ontológico e metafísico tipicamente associadas a contextualidade, não-localidade e psi-ontologia.
Quantum mechanics allows only certain sets of experimental results (or ``probabilistic models'') for Bell-type quantum nonlocality experiments. A derivation of this set from simple physical or information theoretic principles would represent an important step forward in our understanding of quantum mechanics, and this problem has been intensely investigated in recent years. ``Macroscopic locality,'' which requires the recovery of locality in the limit of large numbers of trials, is one of several principles discussed in the literature that place a bound on the set of quantum probabilistic models. A similar question can also be asked about probabilistic models for the more general class of quantum contextuality experiments. Here, we extend the macroscopic locality principle to this more general setting, using the hypergraph approach of Ac\'{\i}n, Fritz, Leverrier, and Sainz [Comm. Math. Phys. 334(2), 533--628 (2015)], which provides a framework to study both phenomena of nonlocality and contextuality in a unified manner. We find that the set of probabilistic models allowed by our macroscopic noncontextuality principle is equivalent to an important and previously studied set in this formalism, which is slightly larger than the quantum set. In the particular case of Bell scenarios, this set is equivalent to the set of ``almost-quantum'' models, which is of particular interest since the latter was recently shown to satisfy all but one of the principles that have been proposed to bound quantum probabilistic models, without being implied by any of them (or even their conjunction). Our condition is the first characterization of the almost-quantum set from a simple physical principle.