Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 110, Issue 41, Pages 16373-16377Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1304884110
Keywords
postulates of quantum mechanics; physics of information; quantum information
Categories
Funding
- CatalunyaCaixa
- European Union (EU) European Research Council Advanced Grant Nonlocality in Space and Time
- EU Quantum Interfaces, Sensors and Communication Based on Entanglement project
- Templeton Foundation
- FQXi large grant project Time and the Structure of Quantum Theory
- Government of Canada through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council
- Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Research and Innovation
- Atomic Quantum Technologies
- Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad through the Juan de la Cierva program
- [MTM2008-01366]
- [S2009/ESP-1594]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Does information play a significant role in the foundations of physics? Information is the abstraction that allows us to refer to the states of systems when we choose to ignore the systems themselves. This is only possible in very particular frameworks, like in classical or quantum theory, or more generally, whenever there exists an information unit such that the state of any system can be reversibly encoded in a sufficient number of such units. In this work, we show how the abstract formalism of quantum theory can be deduced solely from the existence of an information unit with suitable properties, together with two further natural assumptions: the continuity and reversibility of dynamics, and the possibility of characterizing the state of a composite system by local measurements. This constitutes a set of postulates for quantum theory with a simple and direct physical meaning, like the ones of special relativity or thermodynamics, and it articulates a strong connection between physics and information.
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