April 2025

The Causaloid framework is an operational approach aimed to house both the radical aspects of General Relativity — dynamic causal structure, and Quantum Theory — indefiniteness, to provide a scaffolding that might be suitable for Quantum Gravity by providing a landscape of theories that allow for indefinite causal structure. One may consider it as a generalisation of generalised probability theories (or GPTs) where a priori regions are not assumed to have any given causal relationship, to incorporate the possibility of indefinite causal structure. Since its conception, there have been many advances in the field of indefinite causal structure mostly stemming from the work of Chiribella et al. on the quantum switch and supermaps and from Oreshkov et al. on causal inequalities and process matrices. These approaches have systems moving along wires and use Hilbert space structure. They violate the standard causality constraints of Quantum Theory and, in this sense, can be regarded as post-quantum. The Causaloid approach does not necessarily have systems moving along wires or Hilbert spaces. This is the first paper in a trilogy of papers aiming to close the gap between the Causaloid (that allows for GPTs) and post-quantum studies that employ Hilbert spaces. To do so in the present paper, we provide a diagrammatic language for the Causaloid framework along with new terminology for the three levels of physical compression (called Tomographic, Compositional, and Meta compression).

Time-reversal symmetry is a prevalent feature of microscopic physics, including operational quantum theory and classical general relativity. Previous works have studied indefinite causal structure using the language of operational quantum theory, however, these rely on time-asymmetric conditions to constrain both operations and the process matrix. Here, we use time-symmetric, operational probabilistic theory to develop a time-symmetric process matrix formalism for indefinite causal structure. This framework allows for more processes than previously considered and a larger set of causal inequalities. We demonstrate that this larger set of causal inequalities offers new opportunities for device-independent certification of causal non-separability by violating new inequalities. Additionally, we determined that the larger class of time-symmetric processes found here is equivalent to those with Indefinite Causal Order and Time Direction (ICOTD) considered by Chiribella and Liu, thereby providing a description of these processes in terms of process matrices.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently based largely on black-box machine learning models which lack interpretability. The field of eXplainable AI (XAI) strives to address this major concern, being critical in high-stakes areas such as the finance, legal and health sectors. We present an approach to defining AI models and their interpretability based on category theory. For this we employ the notion of a compositional model, which sees a model in terms of formal string diagrams which capture its abstract structure together with its concrete implementation. This comprehensive view incorporates deterministic, probabilistic and quantum models. We compare a wide range of AI models as compositional models, including linear and rule-based models, (recurrent) neural networks, transformers, VAEs, and causal and DisCoCirc models. Next we give a definition of interpretation of a model in terms of its compositional structure, demonstrating how to analyse the interpretability of a model, and using this to clarify common themes in XAI. We find that what makes the standard ‘intrinsically interpretable’ models so transparent is brought out most clearly diagrammatically. This leads us to the more general notion of compositionally-interpretable (CI) models, which additionally include, for instance, causal, conceptual space, and DisCoCirc models. We next demonstrate the explainability benefits of CI models. Firstly, their compositional structure may allow the computation of other quantities of interest, and may facilitate inference from the model to the modelled phenomenon by matching its structure. Secondly, they allow for diagrammatic explanations for their behaviour, based on influence constraints, diagram surgery and rewrite explanations. Finally, we discuss many future directions for the approach, raising the question of how to learn such meaningfully structured models in practice.

In this paper, we present a comprehensive toolbox for studying Carrollian stretched horizons, encompassing their geometry, dynamics, symplectic geometry, symmetries, and corresponding Noether charges. We introduce a precise definition of ruled stretched Carrollian structures (sCarrollian structures) on any surface, generalizing the conventional Carrollian structures of null surfaces, along with the notions of sCarrollian connection and sCarrollian stress tensor. Our approach unifies the sCarrollian (intrinsic) and stretched horizon (embedding) perspectives, providing a universal framework for any causal surface, whether timelike or null. We express the Einstein equations in sCarrollian variables and discuss the phase space symplectic structure of the sCarrollian geometry. Through Noether’s theorem, we derive the Einstein equation and canonical charge and compute the evolution of the canonical charge along the transverse (radial) direction. The latter can be interpreted as a spin-2 symmetry charge. Our framework establishes a novel link between gravity on stretched horizons and Carrollian fluid dynamics and unifies various causal surfaces studied in the literature, including non-expanding and isolated horizons. We expect this work to provide insights into the hydrodynamical description of black holes and the quantization of null surfaces.

A fundamental property of quantum mechanics is that a single qubit can carry at most 1 bit of classical information. For an important class of quantum communication channels, known as entanglement-breaking, this limitation remains valid even if the sender and receiver share entangled particles before the start of the communication: for every entanglement-breaking channel, the rate at which classical messages can be reliably communicated cannot exceed 1 bit per transmitted qubit even with the assistance of quantum entanglement. But does this mean that, for the purpose of communicating classical messages, a noisy entanglement-breaking qubit channel can be replaced by a noisy bit channel? Here we answer the question in the negative. We introduce a game where a player (the sender) assists another player (the receiver) in finding a prize hidden into one of four possible boxes, while avoiding a bomb hidden in one of the three remaining boxes. In this game, the bomb cannot be avoided with certainty if the players communicate through a noisy bit channel. In contrast, the players can deterministically avoid the bomb and find the prize with a guaranteed 1/3 probability if they communicate through an entanglement-breaking qubit channel known as the universal NOT channel. We show that the features of the quantum strategy can be simulated with a noiseless bit channel, but this simulation requires the transmission to be assisted by shared randomness: without shared randomness, even the noiseless transmission of a three-level classical system cannot match the transmission of a single noisy qubit.

We develop a systematic framework to compute the primordial power spectrum up to next-to-next-to-next to leading order (N3LO) in the Hubble-flow parameters for a large class of effective theories of inflation. We assume that the quadratic action for perturbations is characterized by two functions of time, the kinetic amplitude and the speed of sound, that are independent of the Fourier mode $k$. Using the Green’s function method introduced by Stewart $&$ Gong and developed by Auclair $&$ Ringeval, we determine the primordial power spectrum, including its amplitude, spectral indices, their running and running of their running, starting from a given generic action for perturbations. As a check, we reproduce the state-of-the-art results for scalar and the tensor power spectrum of the simplest “vanilla” models of single-field inflation. The framework applies to Weinberg’s effective field theory of inflation (with the condition of no parity violation) and to effective theory of spontaneous de Sitter-symmetry breaking. As a concrete application, we provide the expression for the N3LO power spectrum of $R+R^2$ Starobinsky inflation, without a field redefinition. All expressions are provided in terms of an expansion in one single parameter, the number of inflationary e-foldings $N_*$. Surprisingly we find that, compared to previous leading-order calculations, for $N_* = 55$ the N3LO correction results in a $7%$ decrease of the predicted tensor-to-scalar ratio, in addition to a deviation from the consistency relation. These results provide precise theoretical predictions for the next generation of CMB observations.

Multiphoton indistinguishability is a central resource for quantum enhancement in sensing and computation. Developing and certifying large scale photonic devices requires reliable and accurate characterization of this resource, preferably using methods that are robust against experimental errors. Here, we propose a set of methods for the characterization of multiphoton indistinguishability, based on measurements of bunching and photon number variance. Our methods are robust in a semi-device independent way, in the sense of being effective even when the interferometers are incorrectly dialled. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach using an advanced photonic platform comprising a quantum-dot single-photon source and a universal fully-programmable integrated photonic processor. Our results show the practical usefulness of our methods, providing robust certification tools that can be scaled up to larger systems.

In quantum gravity, it has been argued that a proper accounting of the role played by an observer promotes the von Neumann algebra of observables in a given spacetime subregion from Type III to Type II. While this allows for a mathematically precise definition of its entropy, we show that this procedure depends on which observer is employed. We make this precise by considering a setup in which many possible observers are present; by generalising previous approaches, we derive density operators for the subregion relative to different observers (and relative to arbitrary collections of observers), and we compute the associated entropies in a semiclassical regime, as well as in some specific examples that go beyond this regime. We find that the entropies seen by distinct observers can drastically differ. Our work makes extensive use of the formalism of quantum reference frames (QRF); indeed, as we point out, the ‘observers’ considered here and in the previous works are nothing but QRFs. In the process, we demonstrate that the description of physical states and observables invoked by Chandrasekaran et al. [arXiv:2206.10780] is equivalent to the Page-Wootters formalism, leading to the informal slogan “PW=CLPW”. It is our hope that this paper will help motivate a long overdue union between the QRF and quantum gravity communities. Further details will appear in a companion paper.

Trends of genuine entanglement in Haar uniformly generated multimode pure Gaussian states with fixed average energy per mode are explored. A distance-based metric known as the generalized geometric measure (GGM) is used to quantify genuine entanglement. The GGM of a state is defined as its minimum distance from the set of all non-genuinely entangled states. To begin with, we derive an expression for the Haar averaged value of any function defined on the set of energy-constrained states. Subsequently, we investigate states with a large number of modes and provide a closed-form expression for the Haar averaged GGM in terms of the average energy per mode. Furthermore, we demonstrate that typical states closely approximate their Haar averaged GGM value, with deviation probabilities bounded by an exponentially suppressed limit. We then analyze the GGM content of typical states with a finite number of modes and present the distribution of GGM. Our findings indicate that as the number of modes increases, the distribution shifts towards higher entanglement values and becomes more concentrated. We quantify these features by computing the Haar averaged GGM and the standard deviation of the GGM distribution, revealing that the former increases while the latter decreases with the number of modes.

We study extensions of the mappings arising in usual Channel-State duality to the case of Hilbert spaces with a direct sum structure. This setting arises in representations of algebras with centers, which are commonly associated with constraints, and it has many physical applications from quantum many-body theory to holography and quantum gravity. We establish that there is a general relationship between non-separability of the state and the isometric properties of the induced channel. We also provide a generalisation of our approach to algebras of trace-class operators on infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces.