Characterizing Quantum Theory in Terms of Information-Theoretic Constraints

By Rob Clifton, Jeffrey Bub, Hans Halvorson. 2002

334 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that three fundamental information-theoretic constraints—the impossibility of superluminal information transfer between two physical systems by performing measurements on one of them, the impossibility of broadcasting the information contained in an unknown physical state, and the impossibility of unconditionally secure bit commitment—suffice to entail that the observables and state space of a physical theory are quantum-mechanical. We demonstrate the converse derivation in part, and consider the implications of alternative answers to a remaining open question about nonlocality and bit commitment.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c037c6b50254b3e0bae74eb34fe3d0d8dcd7cd2

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Evidence for the epistemic view of quantum states: A toy theory (2004, background): “Fuchs has popularized the question [20], and it has been addressed in many recent articles [20, 34, 59, 63, 64].”
Quantum Theory and Beyond: Is Entanglement Special? (2009, background): “Candidates for foundational principles were proposed giving a basis for an understanding of quantum theory as a general theor y f information supplemented by several information-theor etic constraints [22, 23, 24, 25, 26].”
Reformulating and Reconstructing Quantum Theory (2011, background): “In the past decade a number of papers have been written on the topic of reconstructing quantum theory [36, 15, 18, 73, 63, 64, 31, 17, 55, 33, 48, 29, 24, 13].”