Abstract:

Quantum Mechanics presents a disturbingly different picture of physical reality to the classical world-view. These non-classical features also offer new resources and possibilities for information processing. At the heart of quantum non-classicality are the phenomena of non-locality, contextuality and entanglement. We shall describe recent work in which tools from Computer Science are used to shed new light on these phenomena. This has led to a number of developments, including a novel approach to classifying multipartite entangled states, and a unifying principle for Bell inequalities based on logical consistency conditions. At the same time, there are also striking and unexpected connections with a number of topics in classical computer science, including relational databases, constraint satisfaction, and natural language semantics.
The  lecture will present an introduction to contextual semantics, in a self-contained, tutorial fashion.
References
[1] Samson Abramsky, Relational Hidden Variables and Non-Locality, Studia Logica, vol. 101(2013), no. 2, pp. 411–452.
[2] Samson Abramsky and Adam Brandenburger, The Sheaf-Theoretic Structure Of Non-Locality and Contextuality, New Journal of Physics, vol. 13(2011), pp. 113036.
[3] Samson Abramsky and Lucien Hardy, Logical Bell Inequalities, Physical Review A, vol. 85(2012), pp. 062114.
[4] Samson Abramsky, Georg Gottlob and Phokion Kolaitis, Robust Constraint Satisfaction and Local Hidden Variables in Quantum Mechanics, Proceedings of International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) (Beijing), (F. Rossi, editor), 2013.
[5] Samson Abramsky, Relational databases and Bell's Theorem, to appear in Buneman Festschrift, Springer 2013.
[6] Samson Abramsky and Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Semantic Unification: a sheaf theoretic approach to natural language, to appear in Lambek 90, 2013.

Short Bio: