Speaker
Description
In quantum theory, conservation laws are typically formulated at a statistical level, holding only on average across measurement outcomes. Recent work has shown that this limitation can be overcome in certain scenarios: by explicitly including the quantum reference frame associated with a system’s preparation, exact conservation can be recovered at the level of individual measurement outcomes. In this talk, we show that this picture becomes substantially more subtle in networks of quantum reference frames, where a single frame may prepare multiple other frames that, in turn, prepare systems which may subsequently interact. In such scenarios, tracking the exchange of conserved quantities in time reveals nontrivial and counterintuitive features, and raises questions about the very nature of conserved quantities.