Papers

We extend the circuit model of quantum computation so that the wiring between gates is soft-coded within registers inside the gates. The addresses in these registers can be manipulated and put into superpositions. This aims at capturing indefinite causal orders and making their geometrical layout explicit: we express the quantum switch and the polarizing beam-splitter within the model. In this context, our main contribution is a full characterization of the anonymity constraints. Indeed, the names used as addresses should not matter beyond the wiring they describe, i.e. quantum evolutions should commute with “renamings”. We show that these quantum evolutions can still act non-trivially upon the names. We specify the structure of “nameblind” matrices.

The `Wigner’s friend’ thought experiment illustrates the puzzling nature of quantum measurement. Časlav Brukner discusses how recent results suggest that in quantum theory the objectivity of measurement outcomes is relative to observation and observer.

Experiments are beginning to probe the interaction of quantum particles with gravitational fields beyond the uniform-field regime. In non-relativistic quantum mechanics, the gravitational field in such experiments can be written as a superposition state. We empirically demonstrate that alternative theories of gravity can avoid gravitational superposition states only by decoupling the gravitational field energy from the quantum particle’s time evolution. Furthermore, such theories must specify a preferred quantum reference frame in which the equations of motion are valid. To the extent that these properties are theoretically implausible, recent experiments provide indirect evidence that gravity has quantum features. Proposed experiments with superposed gravitational sources would provide even stronger evidence that gravity is nonclassical.

The existence of incompatible observables is a cornerstone of quantum mechanics and a valuable resource in quantum technologies. Here we introduce a measure of incompatibility, called the mutual eigenspace disturbance (MED), which quantifies the amount of disturbance induced by the measurement of a sharp observable on the eigenspaces of another. The MED provides a metric on the space of von Neumann measurements, and can be efficiently estimated by letting the measurement processes act in an indefinite order, using a setup known as the quantum switch, which also allows one to quantify the noncommutativity of arbitrary quantum processes. Thanks to these features, the MED can be used in quantum machine learning tasks. We demonstrate this application by providing an unsupervised algorithm that clusters unknown von Neumann measurements. Our algorithm is robust to noise can be used to identify groups of observers that share approximately the same measurement context.

Field mediated entanglement experiments probe the quantum superposition of macroscopically distinct field configurations. We show that this phenomenon can be described by using a transparent quantum field theoretical formulation of electromagnetism and gravity in the field basis. The strength of such a description is that it explicitly displays the superposition of macroscopically distinct states of the field. In the case of (linearised) quantum general relativity, this formulation exhibits the quantum superposition of geometries giving rise to the effect.

We study the behaviour of the Lorentzian Engle-Pereira-Rovelli-Livine spinfoam amplitude with homogeneous boundary data, under a graph refinement going from five to twenty boundary tetrahedra. This can be interpreted as a wave function of the universe, for which we compute boundary geometrical operators, correlation functions and entanglement entropy. The numerical calculation is made possible by adapting the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, along with recently developed computational methods appropriate for the deep quantum regime. We confirm that the transition amplitudes are stable against such refinement. We find that the average boundary geometry does not change, but the new degrees of freedom correct the quantum fluctuations of the boundary and the correlations between spatial patches. The expectation values are compatible with their geometrical interpretation and the correlations between neighbouring patches decay when computed across different spinfoam vertices.

We point out that conservation of information implies that remnants produced at the end of black hole evaporation should radiate in the low-frequency spectrum. We model this emission and derive properties of the diffuse radiation emitted by an otherwise dark population of such objects. We show that for early universe black holes the frequency and energy density of this radiation, which are in principle measurable, suffice to estimate the remnant density.

It has been shown that it is theoretically possible for there to exist quantum and classical processes in which the operations performed by separate parties do not occur in a well-defined causal order. A central question is whether and how such processes can be realised in practice. In order to provide a rigorous argument for the notion that certain such processes have a realisation in standard quantum theory, the concept of time-delocalised quantum subsystem has been introduced. In this paper, we show that realisations on time-delocalised subsystems exist for all unitary extensions of tripartite processes. Remarkably, this class contains processes that violate causal inequalities, i.e., that can generate correlations that witness the incompatibility with definite causal order in a device-independent manner. We consider a known striking example of such a tripartite classical process that has a unitary extension, and study its realisation on time-delocalised subsystems. We then discuss the question of what a violation of causal inequalities implies in this setting, and argue that it is indeed a meaningful concept to show the absence of a definite causal order between the variables of interest.

Atomic clock interferometers are a valuable tool to test the interface between quantum theory and gravity, in particular via the measurement of gravitational time dilation in the quantum regime. Here, we investigate whether gravitational time dilation may be also used as a resource in quantum information theory. In particular, we show that for a freely falling interferometer and for a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, the gravitational time dilation may enhance the precision in estimating the gravitational acceleration for long interferometric times. To this aim, the interferometric measurements should be performed on both the path and the clock degrees of freedom.

Any successful interpretation of quantum mechanics must explain how our empirical evidence allows us to come to know about quantum mechanics. In this article, we argue that this vital criterion is not met by the class of ‘orthodox interpretations,’ which includes QBism, neo-Copenhagen interpretations, and some versions of relational quantum mechanics. We demonstrate that intersubjectivity fails in radical ways in these approaches, and we explain why intersubjectivity matters for empirical confirmation. We take a detailed look at the way in which belief-updating might work in the kind of universe postulated by an orthodox interpretation, and argue that observers in such a universe are unable to escape their own perspective in order to learn about the structure of the set of perspectives that is supposed to make up reality according to these interpretations. We also argue that in some versions of these interpretations it is not even possible to use one’s own relative frequencies for empirical confirmation. Ultimately we conclude that it cannot be rational to believe these sorts of interpretations unless they are supplemented with some observer-independent structure which underwrites intersubjective agreement in at least certain sorts of cases.