Coalgebras, Chu Spaces, and Representations of Physical Systems

We revisit our earlier work on the representation of quantum systems as Chu spaces, and investigate the use of coalgebra as an alternative framework. On the one hand, coalgebras allow the dynamics of repeated measurement to be captured, and provide mathematical tools such as final coalgebras, bisimu...

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Main Author: Abramsky, S
Format: Conference item
Published: 2009
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author Abramsky, S
author_facet Abramsky, S
author_sort Abramsky, S
collection OXFORD
description We revisit our earlier work on the representation of quantum systems as Chu spaces, and investigate the use of coalgebra as an alternative framework. On the one hand, 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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spelling oxford-uuid:da0ec168-fcac-4bc3-9554-2b4f3fd301642022-03-27T09:00:24ZCoalgebras, Chu Spaces, and Representations of Physical SystemsConference itemhttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_5794uuid:da0ec168-fcac-4bc3-9554-2b4f3fd30164Symplectic Elements at Oxford2009Abramsky, SWe revisit our earlier work on the representation of quantum systems as Chu spaces, and investigate the use of coalgebra as an alternative framework. On the one hand, 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.
spellingShingle Abramsky, S
Coalgebras, Chu Spaces, and Representations of Physical Systems
title Coalgebras, Chu Spaces, and Representations of Physical Systems
title_full Coalgebras, Chu Spaces, and Representations of Physical Systems
title_fullStr Coalgebras, Chu Spaces, and Representations of Physical Systems
title_full_unstemmed Coalgebras, Chu Spaces, and Representations of Physical Systems
title_short Coalgebras, Chu Spaces, and Representations of Physical Systems
title_sort coalgebras chu spaces and representations of physical systems
work_keys_str_mv AT abramskys coalgebraschuspacesandrepresentationsofphysicalsystems