The Sheaf-Theoretic Structure Of Non-Locality and Contextuality

Abstract

Locality and non-contextuality are intuitively appealing features of classical physics, which are contradicted by quantum mechanics. The goal of the classic no-go theorems by Bell, Kochen-Specker, et al. is to show that non-locality and contextuality are necessary features of any theory whose predictions agree with those of quantum mechanics. We use the mathematics of sheaf theory to analyze the structure of non-locality and contextuality in a very general setting. Starting from a simple experimental scenario, and the kind of probabilistic models familiar from discussions of Bell’s theorem, we show that there is a very direct, compelling formalization of these notions in sheaf-theoretic terms. Moreover, on the basis of this formulation, we show that the phenomena of non-locality and contextuality can be characterized precisely in terms of obstructions to the existence of global sections. We give linear algebraic methods for computing these obstructions, and use these methods to obtain a number of new insights into non-locality and contextuality. For example, we distinguish a proper hierarchy of strengths of no-go theorems, and show that three leading examples — due to Bell, Hardy, and Greenberger, Horne and Zeilinger, respectively — occupy successively higher levels of this hierarchy. We show how our abstract setting can be represented in quantum mechanics. In doing so, we uncover a strengthening of the usual no-signalling theorem, which shows that quantum mechanics obeys no-signalling for arbitrary families of commuting observables, not just those represented on different factors of a tensor product.