Sufficiency of the counterfactual account of Lüders' rule to rule out ontological models of quantum mechanics

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Autori principali: Tezzin, Alisson, Amaral, Bárbara, Hance, Jonte R.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Tezzin, Alisson
Amaral, Bárbara
Hance, Jonte R.
author_facet Tezzin, Alisson
Amaral, Bárbara
Hance, Jonte R.
contents Ontological models, as used in the generalised contextuality literature, play a central role in current research on quantum foundations, providing a framework for defining classicality, constructing classical analogues of key quantum phenomena, and examining the ontology of quantum states. In this work, we show that a counterfactual account of Lüders' rule -- which we argue is naturally implied by the mathematical structure of the rule itself -- renders such models inherently incompatible with the quantum formalism. This incompatibility arises because the counterfactual update requires ontological models to update their states according to conditional probability, which in turn which in turn renders predictions of sequential measurements order-independent. This implies that ontological models, even contextual ones, must either act differently to what we would expect given (this, typically implicitly-assumed account of) quantum state update rule, or cannot model quantum behaviour.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_15615
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sufficiency of the counterfactual account of Lüders' rule to rule out ontological models of quantum mechanics
Tezzin, Alisson
Amaral, Bárbara
Hance, Jonte R.
Quantum Physics
Mathematical Physics
History and Philosophy of Physics
Ontological models, as used in the generalised contextuality literature, play a central role in current research on quantum foundations, providing a framework for defining classicality, constructing classical analogues of key quantum phenomena, and examining the ontology of quantum states. In this work, we show that a counterfactual account of Lüders' rule -- which we argue is naturally implied by the mathematical structure of the rule itself -- renders such models inherently incompatible with the quantum formalism. This incompatibility arises because the counterfactual update requires ontological models to update their states according to conditional probability, which in turn which in turn renders predictions of sequential measurements order-independent. This implies that ontological models, even contextual ones, must either act differently to what we would expect given (this, typically implicitly-assumed account of) quantum state update rule, or cannot model quantum behaviour.
title Sufficiency of the counterfactual account of Lüders' rule to rule out ontological models of quantum mechanics
topic Quantum Physics
Mathematical Physics
History and Philosophy of Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15615