Kindergarten Quantum Mechanics

Abstract

These lecture notes survey some joint work with Samson Abramsky as it was presented by me at several conferences in the summer of 2005. It concerns `doing quantum mechanics using only pictures of lines, squares, triangles and diamonds'. This picture calculus can be seen as a very substantial extension of Dirac's notation, and has a purely algebraic counterpart in terms of so-called Strongly Compact Closed Categories (introduced by Abramsky and I in quant-ph/0402130 and [4]) which subsumes my Logic of Entanglement quant-ph/0402014. For a survey on the `what', the `why' and the `hows' I refer to a previous set of lecture notes quant-ph/0506132. In a last section we provide some pointers to the body of technical literature on the subject.