Quantum Institute: Visitor Schedule

The Quantum Lunch is regularly held on Thursdays in the Theoretical Division Conference Room, TA-3, Building 123, Room 121.
For more information, contact Diego Dalvit.
To add your name to the Quantum Lunch email list, contact Charlotte Lehman

Thursday, August 26, 2010
12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Speaker: Lorenzo Maccone (MIT and Pavia)

Technical Host: Wojciech Zurek

TOPIC: Quantum Randomness from Locality

Abstract
Conventional textbook quantum mechanics introduces randomness of measurement outcomes, along with the Born rule, as a postulate of the theory. Nonetheless, after various attempts the Born rule was recently derived from the other postulates. A common assumption of these derivations is that different "branches" of the wavefunction represent alternative situations. Without this assumption there is no compelling reason for a probabilistic interpretation: alternatives are possible. Here, by using envariance and a modified Bell inequality that employs no Born rule, we show that randomness of outcomes is inevitable if one wants the theory to be local, and hence causal. In other words, we prove inevitability of randomness using locality to justify Everett's identification of random "events" with "branches", and thus show that one can obtain the Born rule replacing the wavefunction-branches assumption with a physically-motivated locality one.