A while back, I had a bit of a sprawling conversation about certain geometrical oddities over multiple threads at the n-Category Café. I finally got organized enough to gather these notes together, incorporating edits for clarity and recording one construction I haven’t found written in the literature anywhere.
Sometimes, mathematical oddities crowd in upon one another, and the exceptions to one classification scheme reveal themselves as fellow-travelers with the exceptions to a quite different taxonomy.
UPDATE (30 March 2019): Thanks to a kind offer by John Baez, we’re going through this material step-by-step over at a blog with a community, the n-Category Café:
- Part 1: Definitions and preliminaries
- Part 2: Qutrits and E6
- Part 3: The Hoggar lines, E7 and E8
One more paper to round out the year!
J. B. DeBrota, C. A. Fuchs and B. C. Stacey, “Triply Positive Matrices and Quantum Measurements Motivated by QBism” [arXiv:1812.08762].
We study a class of quantum measurements that furnish probabilistic representations of finite-dimensional quantum theory. The Gram matrices associated with these Minimal Informationally Complete quantum measurements (MICs) exhibit a rich structure. They are “positive” matrices in three different senses, and conditions expressed in terms of them have shown that the Symmetric Informationally Complete measurements (SICs) are in some ways optimal among MICs. Here, we explore MICs more widely than before, comparing and contrasting SICs with other classes of MICs, and using Gram matrices to begin the process of mapping the territory of all MICs. Moreover, the Gram matrices of MICs turn out to be key tools for relating the probabilistic representations of quantum theory furnished by MICs to quasi-probabilistic representations, like Wigner functions, which have proven relevant for quantum computation. Finally, we pose a number of conjectures, leaving them open for future work.
This is a sequel to our paper from May, and it contains one minor erratum for an article from 2013.
Time again for the New Paper Dance!
B. C. Stacey, “QBism and the Ithaca Desiderata” [arXiv:1812.05549].
In 1996, N. David Mermin proposed a set of desiderata for an understanding of quantum mechanics, the “Ithaca Interpretation”. In 2012, Mermin became a public advocate of QBism, an interpretation due to Christopher Fuchs and Ruediger Schack. Here, we evaluate QBism with respect to the Ithaca Interpretation’s six desiderata, in the process also evaluating those desiderata themselves. This analysis reveals a genuine distinction between QBism and the IIQM, but also a natural progression from one to the other.
There was some water-cooler talk around the office this past week about a paper by Masanes, Galley and Müller that hit the arXiv, and I decided to write up my thoughts about it for ease of future reference. In short, I have no reason yet to think that the math is wrong, but what they present as a condition on states seems more naturally to me like a condition on measurement outcomes. Upon making this substitution, the Masanes, Galley and Müller result comes much closer to resembling Gleason’s theorem than they say it does.
So, if you’re wanting for some commentary on quantum mechanics, here goes:
Continue reading The State Space of Quantum Mechanics is Redundant →
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