Abstract

Summary. Monoidal dagger categories play a central role in the abstract quantum mechanics of Abramsky and Coecke. The authors show that a great deal of elementary quantum mechanics can be carried out in these categories; for example, the Born rule emerges naturally. In this paper, we construct a category of tame formal distributions with coefficients in a commutative associative algebra and show that it is a dagger category. This gives access to a broad new class of models, with the abstract scalars in the sense of Abramsky being the elements of the algebra. We will also consider a subcategory of local formal distributions, based on the ideas of Kac. Locality has been of fundamental significance in various formulations of quantum field theory. Thus our work may provide the possibility of extending the abstract framework to QFT. We also show that these categories of formal distributions are monoidal and contain a nuclear ideal, a weak form of adjunction appropriate for analyzing categories

Citations