Signatures of causality and determinism in a quantum theory of events

Abstract

By representing an event as the joint state of a detector-timer couple that interact with a system, we recover the familiar tensor product structure, used to describe spatially separated systems, in the context of timelike events. Furthermore, with this approach, we extend the superposition principle to the moment of occurrence of events. We then outline quantum signatures of causality that manifest through coherence in the detector state and correlation functions of time operators. Finally, we expand the scope of quantum information theoretic measures of state discrimination and information content, commonly used to characterize spatially separated systems, to events in spacetime. For causally connected events, we illustrate a deterministic relationship between events (akin to spatially entangled physical systems) where observing a previous event (one subsystem), enables us to delineate a later event (the other subsystem).

References in corpus (15)

• Quantifying Coherence
• Classical, quantum and total correlations
• Quantum correlations with no causal order
• Quantum computations without definite causal structure
• Bell-type inequalities to detect true n-body non-separability
• Enhanced communication with the assistance of indefinite causal order
• Quantum Logic and the Histories Approach to Quantum Theory
• Towards Quantum Gravity: A Framework for Probabilistic Theories with Non-Fixed Causal Structure
• Bell-type inequalities for partial separability in N-particle systems and quantum mechanical violations
• Quantum Refrigeration with Indefinite Causal Order
• Superdensity Operators for Spacetime Quantum Mechanics
• Quantum-coherent mixtures of causal relations
• Connecting processes with indefinite causal order and multi-time quantum states
• A local and operational framework for the foundations of physics
• A quantum formalism for events and how time can emerge from its foundations