Two Roads to Classicality

Bob Coecke
(University of Oxford)
John Selby
(Imperial College London)
Sean Tull
(University of Oxford)

Mixing and decoherence are both manifestations of classicality within quantum theory, each of which admit a very general category-theoretic construction. We show under which conditions these two 'roads to classicality' coincide. This is indeed the case for (finite-dimensional) quantum theory, where each construction yields the category of C*-algebras and completely positive maps. We present counterexamples where the property fails which includes relational and modal theories. Finally, we provide a new interpretation for our category-theoretic generalisation of decoherence in terms of 'leaking information'.

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. 104–118.
Published: 27th February 2018.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.266.7 bibtex PDF
References in reconstructed bibtex, XML and HTML format (approximated).
Comments and questions to: eptcs@eptcs.org
For website issues: webmaster@eptcs.org