Giulio Chiribella

The core of my research activity lies at the intersection between Quantum Foundations and Quantum Information. The theory of Quantum Information Processing showed a wealth of protocols and algorithms stemming from the counterintuitive mathematics of quantum mechanics. Also, it emphasized that the rules of information processing are dictated by physics and that different physical theories, like classical and quantum mechanics, entail very different models of information processing. One of the main challenges now is to completely characterize the quantum model of information processing through a small set of physical axioms, thus reducing the variety of known quantum protocols to few basic unifying principles. One motivation to do so is, in my opinion, that the present understanding of the interplay between physics and information processing is too indirect, and the fundamental connections between physical principles and quantum protocols are not as transparent as they could be. The main reason for that is that the connections between different protocols and quantum mechanical features are not direct, but instead they are mediated by the abstract formalism of Hilbert spaces and operator algebras. I believe that eventually the understanding of quantum theory achieved through the axiomatization of quantum information processing will be extremely useful for the advancement of fundamental physics. However, providing a conceptual foundation of quantum information processing will not be the conclusion of the foundational research about the interplay between physical principles and models of information processing. An ambitious goal would be to provide a classification of all possible physical models of information processing, in analogy to the classification of all possible models of geometry that was achieved in the nineteenth century with the advent of non-euclidean geometries.