Higher Semantics of Quantum Protocols

Abstract

We propose a higher semantics for the description of quantum protocols, which deals with quantum and classical information in a unified way. Central to our approach is the modelling of classical data by information transfer to the environment, and the use of 2-category theory to formalize the resulting framework. This 2-categorical semantics has a graphical calculus, the diagrams of which correspond exactly to physically-implementable quantum procedures. Quantum teleportation in its most general sense is reformulated as the ability to remove correlations between a quantum system and its environment, and is represented by an elegant graphical identity. We use this new formalism to describe two new families of quantum protocols.