Quantum Mechanics as Quantum Information (and only a little more)

By Christopher A. Fuchs. 2002

489 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, I try once again to cause some good-natured trouble. The issue remains, when will we ever stop burdening the taxpayer with conferences devoted to the quantum foundations? The suspicion is expressed that no end will be in sight until a means is found to reduce quantum theory to two or three statements of crisp physical (rather than abstract, axiomatic) significance. In this regard, no tool appears better calibrated for a direct assault than quantum information theory. Far from a strained application of the latest fad to a time-honored problem, this method holds promise precisely because a large part--but not all--of the structure of quantum theory has always concerned information. It is just that the physics community needs reminding. This paper, though taking quant-ph/0106166 as its core, corrects one mistake and offers several observations beyond the previous version. In particular, I identify one element of quantum mechanics that I would not label a subjective term in the theory--it is the integer parameter D traditionally ascribed to a quantum system via its Hilbert-space dimension.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/785c449df7eec1ff86f262c33b377f14fd9f819d

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Citations in the corpus

Evidence for the epistemic view of quantum states: A toy theory (2004, background): “[55] C.H. Bennett, D.P. DiVincenzo, C.A. Fuchs, T. Mor, E. Rains, P.W. Shor, J.A. Smolin and W.K. Wootters, “Quantum Nonlocality without Entanglement”, Phys.”
Continuous-variable optical quantum-state tomography (2009, background): “3 An important exception is the work by Chou et al. (2005), where”
A Quantum-Bayesian Route to Quantum-State Space (2009, background): “Maybe even more importantly, the success of this approach provides a compelling case for quantum Bayesianism [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12].”
What is quantum information (2016, background): “These different ways of conceiving quantum information as strongly tied to quantum mechanics have consequences on the attempts to reconstruct quantum mechanics in informational terms (Fuchs 2002, Clifton, Bub and Halvorson 2003).”
Contextuality for preparations, transformations, and unsharp measurements (2004, background): “Indeed, in light of the arguments that have recently been made in favor of the epistemic view of quantum states [22, 23, 24, 25] and the fact that one can reproduce qualitatively many quantum phenomena in noncontextual theories [25, 26, 27, 28], the impossibility of a preparation noncontextual ontol”
Unknown Quantum States and Operations, a Bayesian View (2004, unknown): “[4,6], it has been argued strenuously that quantum operations should be considered of essentially the same physical meaning and status as quantum states themselves: They are Bayesian expressions of an experimenter’s judgment.”
Reformulating and Reconstructing Quantum Theory (2011, background): “This program was very much inspired by Fuchs’s suggestion that we need to find information-theoretic reasons for the quantum axioms (presented in a number of talks and written up in [26]).”
Symmetric informationally complete–positive operator valued measures and the extended Clifford group (2004, unknown): “ar X iv :q ua nt -p h/ 04 12 00 1v 2 1 7 Ja n 20 05 SIC-POVMs AND THE EXTENDED CLIFFORD GROUP”
On Participatory Realism (2016, background): “John Archibald Wheeler’s writings were a tremendous influence on the point of view on quantum mechanics we now call QBism [1], developed by the author [2, 3, 4, 5] and colleagues Carlton Caves [6, 7, 8, 9], Asher Peres [10, 11], Marcus Appleby [12, 13, 14, 18, 15, 16, 17], Blake Stacey [19, 20, 21],”
Do We Really Understand Quantum Mechanics? (2012, background): “5 Here is for instance how Fuchs [519] describes the program of informational quantum theory: “The quantum”
Symmetric informationally complete quantum measurements (2003, background): “In quantum information theory such measurements are relevant to quantum state tomography [13], quantum cryptography [14], and to foundational studies [15] where they would make for a particularly interesting “standard quantum measurement”.”
QBism, the Perimeter of Quantum Bayesianism (2010, background): “[2,5,20]—how can the project even get off the ground? As one can ask of the Big Bang, “What banged?,” the QBist must ask, “In those”