arXiv subjects

John B. DeBrota

Publications and source records attributed to John B. DeBrota.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

QBism on Locality and Nonlocality

Recently Pienaar (2026), building on work of Cavalcanti (2021), has shown that QBism cannot always assume distinct observers' quantum-measurement outcomes---say, of Wigner and his friend---are embedded in a single spacetime. This follows from QBism's rejection of the `Absoluteness of Observed Events' assumption in the Bong et al. no-go theorem. Thus, QBism has no choice but to treat the notion of spacetime every bit as personalistic as it treats quantum states and quantum measurement outcomes. In a way, this is not a surprise to QBists, as they have taken the notion of `personalist spacetimes' to be the ansatz most compatible with their other views since at least 2009. But it does enjoin us to finally make crystal clear the sense in which QBism is a purely local interpretation of quantum mechanics despite this new theorem and despite quantum theory's age-old violation of Bell's inequalities. With the extra clarity we also hope to poise QBism for a distinctly new way to approach issues at the interface of quantum theory and gravity.

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arXiv2026

Robust Negativity in the Quantum-to-Classical Transition of Kerr Dynamics

We quantify the quantum-to-classical transition of the single-mode Kerr nonlinear dynamics in the presence of loss. We establish three time scales that govern the dynamics, each with distinct characteristics. For times short compared to the Ehrenfest time, the evolution is classical, characterized by Gaussian dynamics. For sufficiently long times, as we increase the initial photon number, unitary Kerr evolution would generate macroscopic superpositions of coherent states (so-called kitten states), but this is severely restricted in the presence of small photon loss so that expectation values of observables coincide with their classical values. The intermediate time scale, however, shows resilient quantum behavior in the macroscopic limit. We show that in the mean-field non-Gaussian regime, the Kerr Hamiltonian (with small photon loss) generates a significant amount of Wigner-negativity, and classical flow is recovered only if the loss rate grows with system size. Our results broaden the usual understanding of quantum-to-classical transitions and demonstrate the potential for creating robust nonclassical resources for continuous-variable quantum information processing in the presence of loss.

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arXiv2026

Bayesian rational agents in iterated quantum games

We apply a Bayesian agent-based framework inspired by QBism to iterations of two quantum games, the CHSH game and the quantum prisoners' dilemma. In each two-player game, players hold beliefs about an amount of shared entanglement and about the actions or beliefs of the other player. Each takes actions which maximize their expected utility and revises their beliefs with the classical Bayes rule between rounds. We simulate iterated play to see if and how players can learn about the presence of shared entanglement and to explore how their performance, their beliefs, and the game's structure interrelate. In the CHSH game, we find that players can learn that entanglement is present and use this to achieve quantum advantage. We find that they can only do so if they also believe the other player will act correctly to exploit the entanglement. In the case of low or zero entanglement in the CHSH game, the players cannot achieve quantum advantage, even in the case where they believe the entanglement is higher than it is. For the prisoners dilemma, we show that assuming 1-fold rational players (rational players who believe the other player is also rational) reduces the quantum extension [Eisert, Wilkens, and Lewenstein, Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 3077 (1999)] of the prisoners dilemma to a game with only two strategies, one of which (defect) is dominant for low entanglement, and the other (the quantum strategy Q) is dominant for high entanglement. For intermediate entanglement, neither strategy is dominant. We again show that players can learn entanglement in iterated play. We also show that strong belief in entanglement causes optimal play even in the absence of entanglement -- showing that belief in entanglement is acting as a proxy for the players trusting each other. Our work points to possible future applications in resource detection and quantum algorithm design.

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arXiv2026

Consciousness, Quantum Mechanics, and the Limits of Scientific Objectivism

Consciousness and quantum mechanics are among the most puzzling phenomena studied in the sciences. Some scholars suggest they are related, though others think this claim commits a "minimization of mystery" fallacy. The aim of this programmatic paper is to draw attention to a less widely discussed parallel between consciousness and quantum mechanics: both challenge the classical objectivist worldview of science. Under certain assumptions, they are each in tension with a package of metaphysical theses -- "non-relationalism", "non-fragmentation", and "one world" -- that jointly make up that worldview. This points to three distinct non-objectivist responses: the "relationalist", "fragmentalist", and "many-subjective-worlds" ones. We will map out their pros and cons.

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arXiv2026

A Heptalemma for Quantum Mechanics

We present a seven-pronged no-go result for quantum mechanics: a "heptalemma". It shows that seven initially plausible theses about physical reality are jointly inconsistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics, while any six are jointly consistent. We must then decide which theses to retain and which to give up. Since different interpretations of quantum mechanics entail different responses to the heptalemma, we get a novel taxonomy of such interpretations. Beyond the application to quantum mechanics, the heptalemma offers a general diagnostic criterion for determining whether a given scientific domain should count as classical or not, and if not, how it departs from classicality.

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arXiv2024

Quantum Dynamics Happens Only on Paper: QBism's Account of Decoherence

QBism has long recognized quantum states, POVM elements, Kraus operators, and even unitary operations to be cut from the same cloth: They express aspects of an agent's belief system concerning the consequences (for her) of actions she might take upon her external world. Such action-consequence pairs have conventionally been called "quantum measurements." The calculus of quantum theory is then viewed as an empirically motivated addition to Bayesian decision theory when brought to this notion of measurement. This radical approach has allowed QBism to eliminate conceptual problems that plague other interpretations of quantum mechanics. However, one issue has remained elusive: If a QBist does not believe in the existence of an ontic (agent-independent) dynamical variable evolving over time, why would there be any constraints on her quantum-state assignment in the absence of performing a measurement? Why would she introduce unitary or open-system quantum dynamics at all? Here, we present a representation theorem based on van Fraassen's reflection principle to answer these questions. Simply put, an agent's assignment of quantum dynamics represents her belief that a measurement action she is contemplating would not change her current odds for future gambles. A corollary to this approach is that one can make sense of "open-system dynamics" without the need to introduce an "environment with a measurement record," as is common in decoherence accounts of quantum measurement. QBism's understanding instead rests more fundamentally on an agent's beliefs about the system of interest (not system plus environment) and her judgments about measurements she might perform on that system. More broadly, this result establishes QBism's contention that measurement itself is the central concept of quantum theory and thus the framework upon which any future QBist ontology must hang.

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arXiv2024

Synthesizing the Born rule with reinforcement learning

According to the subjective Bayesian interpretation of quantum theory (QBism), quantum mechanics is a tool that an agent would be wise to use when making bets about natural phenomena. In particular, the Born rule is understood to be a decision-making norm, an ideal which one should strive to meet even if usually falling short in practice. What is required for an agent to make decisions that conform to quantum mechanics? Here we investigate how a realistic (hence non-ideal) agent might deviate from the Born rule in its decisions. To do so we simulate a simple agent as a reinforcement-learning algorithm that makes `bets' on the outputs of a symmetric informationally-complete measurement (SIC) and adjusts its decisions in order to maximize its expected return. We quantify how far the algorithm's decision-making behavior departs from the ideal form of the Born rule and investigate the limiting factors. We propose an experimental implementation of the scenario using heralded single photons.

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arXiv2024

Decoherence Limits the Cost to Simulate an Anharmonic Oscillator

We study how decoherence increases the efficiency with which we can simulate the quantum dynamics of an anharmonic oscillator, governed by the Kerr effect. As decoherence washes out the fine-grained subPlanck structure associated with phase-space quantum interference in the closed quantum system, open quantum dynamics can be more efficiently simulated using a coarse-grained finite-difference numerical integration. We tie this to the way in which decoherence recovers the semiclassical truncated Wigner approximation (TWA), which strongly differs from the exact closed-system dynamics at times when quantum interference leads to cat states and more general superpositions of coherent states. The regression in quadrature measurement statistics to semiclassical dynamics becomes more pronounced as the initial amplitude of the oscillator grows, with implications for the quantum advantage that might be accessible as system size grows in noisy quantum devices. Lastly, we show that this regression does not have the form of a convex noise model, such as for a depolarizing noise channel. Instead, closed quantum system effects interact with the open system effects, giving rise to distinct open system behavior.

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arXiv2023

Symmetric Informationally Complete Measurements Identify the Irreducible Difference between Classical and Quantum Systems

We describe a general procedure for associating a minimal informationally-complete quantum measurement (or MIC) and a set of linearly independent post-measurement quantum states with a purely probabilistic representation of the Born Rule. Such representations are motivated by QBism, where the Born Rule is understood as a consistency condition between probabilities assigned to the outcomes of one experiment in terms of the probabilities assigned to the outcomes of other experiments. In this setting, the difference between quantum and classical physics is the way their physical assumptions augment bare probability theory: Classical physics corresponds to a trivial augmentation -- one just applies the Law of Total Probability (LTP) between the scenarios -- while quantum theory makes use of the Born Rule expressed in one or another of the forms of our general procedure. To mark the irreducible difference between quantum and classical, one should seek the representations that minimize the disparity between the expressions. We prove that the representation of the Born Rule obtained from a symmetric informationally-complete measurement (or SIC) minimizes this distinction in at least two senses -- the first to do with unitarily invariant distance measures between the rules, and the second to do with available volume in a reference probability simplex (roughly speaking a new kind of uncertainty principle). Both of these arise from a significant majorization result. This work complements recent studies in quantum computation where the deviation of the Born Rule from the LTP is measured in terms of negativity of Wigner functions.

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arXiv2022

Born's rule as a quantum extension of Bayesian coherence

The subjective Bayesian interpretation of probability asserts that the rules of the probability calculus follow from the normative principle of Dutch-book coherence: A decision-making agent should not assign probabilities such that a series of monetary transactions based on those probabilities would lead them to expect a sure loss. Similarly, the subjective Bayesian interpretation of quantum mechanics (QBism) asserts that the Born rule is a normative rule in analogy to Dutch-book coherence, but with the addition of one or more empirically based assumptions -- i.e., the "only a little more" that connects quantum theory to the particular characteristics of the physical world. Here we make this link explicit for a conjectured representation of the Born rule which holds true if symmetric informationally complete POVMs (or SICs) exist for every finite dimensional Hilbert space. We prove that an agent who thinks they are gambling on the outcomes of measurements on a sufficiently quantum-like system, but refuses to use this form of the Born rule when placing their bets is vulnerable to a Dutch book. The key property for being sufficiently quantum-like is that the system admits a symmetric reference measurement, but that this measurement is not sampling any hidden variables.

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arXiv2022

Quantum and Classical Bayesian Agents

We describe a general approach to modeling rational decision-making agents who adopt either quantum or classical mechanics based on the Quantum Bayesian (QBist) approach to quantum theory. With the additional ingredient of a scheme by which the properties of one agent may influence another, we arrive at a flexible framework for treating multiple interacting quantum and classical Bayesian agents. We present simulations in several settings to illustrate our construction: quantum and classical agents receiving signals from an exogenous source, two interacting classical agents, two interacting quantum agents, and interactions between classical and quantum agents. A consistent treatment of multiple interacting users of quantum theory may allow us to properly interpret existing multi-agent protocols and could suggest new approaches in other areas such as quantum algorithm design.

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arXiv2021

Relating measurement disturbance, information and orthogonality

In the general theory of quantum measurement, one associates a positive semidefinite operator on a $d$-dimensional Hilbert space to each of the $n$ possible outcomes of an arbitrary measurement. In the special case of a projective measurement, these operators are pairwise Hilbert--Schmidt orthogonal, but when $n>d$, orthogonality is restricted by positivity. This restriction allows us to more precisely state the quantum adage: information gain of a system is always accompanied by unavoidable disturbance. Specifically, we investigate three properties of a measurement with Lüders rule updating: its disturbance, a measure of how the expected post-measurement state deviates from the input; its measurement strength, a measure of the intrinsic information producing capacity of the measurement; and its orthogonality, a measure of the degree to which the measurement operators differ from an orthonormal set. These quantities satisfy an information-disturbance trade-off relation that highlights the additional role played by orthogonality. Finally, we assess several classes of measurements on these grounds and identify symmetric informationally complete quantum measurements as the unique quantum analogs of a perfectly informative and nondisturbing classical ideal measurement.

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arXiv2020

The Varieties of Minimal Tomographically Complete Measurements

Minimal Informationally Complete quantum measurements, or MICs, illuminate the structure of quantum theory and how it departs from the classical. Central to this capacity is their role as tomographically complete measurements with the fewest possible number of outcomes for a given finite dimension. Despite their advantages, little is known about them. We establish general properties of MICs, explore constructions of several classes of them, and make some developments to the theory of MIC Gram matrices. These Gram matrices turn out to be a rich subject of inquiry, relating linear algebra, number theory and probability. Among our results are some equivalent conditions for unbiased MICs, a characterization of rank-1 MICs through the Hadamard product, several ways in which immediate properties of MICs capture the abandonment of classical phase space intuitions, and a numerical study of MIC Gram matrix spectra. We also present, to our knowledge, the first example of an unbiased rank-1 MIC which is not group covariant. This work provides further context to the discovery that the symmetric informationally complete quantum measurements (SICs) are in many ways optimal among MICs. In a deep sense, the ideal measurements of quantum physics are not orthogonal bases.

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arXiv2020

Respecting One's Fellow: QBism's Analysis of Wigner's Friend

According to QBism, quantum states, unitary evolutions, and measurement operators are all understood as personal judgments of the agent using the formalism. Meanwhile, quantum measurement outcomes are understood as the personal experiences of the same agent. Wigner's conundrum of the friend, in which two agents ostensibly have different accounts of whether or not there is a measurement outcome, thus poses no paradox for QBism. Indeed the resolution of Wigner's original thought experiment was central to the development of QBist thinking. The focus of this paper concerns two very instructive modifications to Wigner's puzzle: One, a recent no-go theorem by Frauchiger and Renner, and the other a thought experiment by Baumann and Brukner. We show that the paradoxical features emphasized in these works disappear once both friend and Wigner are understood as agents on an equal footing with regard to their individual uses of quantum theory. Wigner's action on his friend then becomes, from the friend's perspective, an action the friend takes on Wigner. Our analysis rests on a kind of quantum Copernican principle: When two agents take actions on each other, each agent has a dual role as a physical system for the other agent. No user of quantum theory is more privileged than any other. In contrast to the sentiment of Wigner's original paper, neither agent should be considered as in "suspended animation." In this light, QBism brings an entirely new perspective to understanding Wigner's friend thought experiments.

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arXiv2020

Discrete Wigner Functions from Informationally Complete Quantum Measurements

Wigner functions provide a way to do quantum physics using quasiprobabilities, that is, "probability" distributions that can go negative. Informationally complete POVMs, a much younger subject than phase space formulations of quantum mechanics, are less familiar but provide wholly probabilistic representations of quantum theory. In this paper, we show that the Born Rule links these two classes of structure and discuss the art of interconverting between them. In particular, we demonstrate that the operator bases corresponding to minimal discrete Wigner functions (Wigner bases) are orthogonalizations of minimal informationally complete measurements (MICs). By not imposing a particular discrete phase space structure at the outset, we push Wigner functions to their limits in a suitably quantified sense, revealing a new way in which the symmetric informationally complete measurements (SICs) are significant. Finally, we speculate that astute choices of MICs from the orthogonalization preimages of Wigner bases may in general give quantum measurements conceptually underlying the associated quasiprobability representations.

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arXiv2020

Lüders Channels and the Existence of Symmetric Informationally Complete Measurements

The Lüders rule provides a way to define a quantum channel given a quantum measurement. Using this construction, we establish an if-and-only-if condition for the existence of a $d$-dimensional Symmetric Informationally Complete quantum measurement (a SIC) in terms of a particular depolarizing channel. Moreover, the channel in question satisfies two entropic optimality criteria.

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arXiv2019

FAQBism

We answer several questions that have been Frequently Asked about QBism. These remarks (many of them lighthearted) should be considered supplements to more systematic treatments by the authors and others.

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arXiv2017

Negativity Bounds for Weyl-Heisenberg Quasiprobability Representations

The appearance of negative terms in quasiprobability representations of quantum theory is known to be inevitable, and, due to its equivalence with the onset of contextuality, of central interest in quantum computation and information. Until recently, however, nothing has been known about how much negativity is necessary in a quasiprobability representation. Zhu proved that the upper and lower bounds with respect to one type of negativity measure are saturated by quasiprobability representations which are in one-to-one correspondence with the elusive symmetric informationally complete quantum measurements (SICs). We define a family of negativity measures which includes Zhu's as a special case and consider another member of the family which we call "sum negativity." We prove a sufficient condition for local maxima in sum negativity and find exact global maxima in dimensions $3$ and $4$. Notably, we find that Zhu's result on the SICs does not generally extend to sum negativity, although the analogous result does hold in dimension $4$. Finally, the Hoggar lines in dimension $8$ make an appearance in a conjecture on sum negativity.

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