Spectral Presheaves, Kochen-Specker Contextuality, and Quantale-Valued Relations

Kevin Dunne
(University of Strathclyde)

In the topos approach to quantum theory of Doering and Isham the Kochen–Specker Theorem, which asserts the contextual nature of quantum theory, can be reformulated in terms of the global sections of a presheaf characterised by the Gelfand spectrum of a commutative C*-algebra. In previous work we showed how this topos perspective can be generalised to a class of categories typically studied within the monoidal approach to quantum theory of Abramsky and Coecke, and in particular how one can generalise the Gelfand spectrum. Here we study the Gelfand spectrum presheaf for categories of quantale-valued relations, and by considering its global sections we give a non-contextuality result for these categories. We also show that the Gelfand spectrum comes equipped with a topology which has a natural interpretation when thinking of these structures as representing physical theories.

In Bob Coecke and Aleks Kissinger: Proceedings 14th International Conference on Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL 2017), Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 3-7 July 2017, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 266, pp. 386–398.
Published: 27th February 2018.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.266.24 bibtex PDF
References in reconstructed bibtex, XML and HTML format (approximated).
Comments and questions to: eptcs@eptcs.org
For website issues: webmaster@eptcs.org