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Coalgebras, Chu Spaces, and Representations of Physical Systems

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Abstract

We investigate the use of coalgebra to represent quantum systems, thus providing a basis for the use of coalgebraic methods in quantum information and computation. Coalgebras allow the dynamics of repeated measurement to be captured, and provide mathematical tools such as final coalgebras, bisimulation and coalgebraic logic. However, the standard coalgebraic framework does not accommodate contravariance, and is too rigid to allow physical symmetries to be represented. We introduce a fibrational structure on coalgebras in which contravariance is represented by indexing. We use this structure to give a universal semantics for quantum systems based on a final coalgebra construction. We characterize equality in this semantics as projective equivalence. We also define an analogous indexed structure for Chu spaces, and use this to obtain a novel categorical description of the category of Chu spaces. We use the indexed structures of Chu spaces and coalgebras over a common base to define a truncation functor from coalgebras to Chu spaces. This truncation functor is used to lift the full and faithful representation of the groupoid of physical symmetries on Hilbert spaces into Chu spaces, obtained in our previous work, to the coalgebraic semantics.

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Notes

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  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QD, UK

    Samson Abramsky

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Abramsky, S. Coalgebras, Chu Spaces, and Representations of Physical Systems. J Philos Logic 42, 551–574 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-013-9276-4

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