14 March 2012, CWI PNA6 seminar, Sonja Smets

This talk is based on joint work with A. Baltag on the use of concepts and techniques from Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) to model and reason about quantum behavior. First I will concentrate on an improvement of the older results (due to Piron, Soler, Mayet and others) on the 'Hilbert-complete' axiomatizations of algebraic quantum logic and present a dynamic-logical setting, in which physical actions (and not only static physical properties) are logically represented. Secondly I will focus on compound systems and analyse both classical and quantum correlations. Our formalism for this is based on an extension of epistemic logic with operators for 'group knowledge'. And as models I introduce correlation models, as a generalization of the 'interpreted systems' semantics (commonly used in Computer Science as a model for information flow in distributed systems). I use this second setting to investigate the relationship between the information carried by each of the parts of a complex system and the information carried by the whole system. Our dynamic logical setting explains the non-local informational dynamics of quantum systems that are triggered by quantum observations (measurements) and un-observed evolutions (quantum gates), and the epistemic logical setting yields an informational-logical characterization of the notion of 'quantum entanglement'.