Groupoid sheaves as quantale sheaves

Several notions of sheaf on various types of quantale have been proposed and studied in the last twenty five years. It is fairly standard that for an involutive quantale Q satisfying mild algebraic properties the sheaves on Q can be defined to be the idempotent self-adjoint Q-valued matrices. These can be thought of as Q-valued equivalence relations, and, accordingly, the morphisms of sheaves are the Q-valued functional relations. Few concrete examples of such sheaves are known, however, and in this paper we provide a new one by showing that the category of equivariant sheaves on a localic etale groupoid G (the classifying topos of G) is equivalent to the category of sheaves on its involutive quantale O(G). As a means towards this end we begin by replacing the category of matrix sheaves on Q by an equivalent category of complete Hilbert Q-modules, and we approach the envisaged example where Q is an inverse quantal frame O(G) by placing it in the wider context of stably supported quantales, on one hand, and in the wider context of a module theoretic description of arbitrary actions of \'etale groupoids, both of which may be interesting in their own right.Comment: 62 pages. Structure of preprint has changed. It now contains the contents of former arXiv:0807.3859 (withdrawn), and the definition of Q-sheaf applies only to inverse quantal frames (Hilbert Q-modules with enough sections are given no special name for more general quantales

Quantum channels as a categorical completion

We propose a categorical foundation for the connection between pure and mixed states in quantum information and quantum computation. The foundation is based on distributive monoidal categories. First, we prove that the category of all quantum channels is a canonical completion of the category of pure quantum operations (with ancilla preparations). More precisely, we prove that the category of completely positive trace-preserving maps between finite-dimensional C*-algebras is a canonical completion of the category of finite-dimensional vector spaces and isometries. Second, we extend our result to give a foundation to the topological relationships between quantum channels. We do this by generalizing our categorical foundation to the topologically-enriched setting. In particular, we show that the operator norm topology on quantum channels is the canonical topology induced by the norm topology on isometries.Comment: 12 pages + ref, accepted at LICS 201

Categories, norms and weights

The well-known Lawvere category R of extended real positive numbers comes with a monoidal closed structure where the tensor product is the sum. But R has another such structure, given by multiplication, which is *-autonomous. Normed sets, with a norm in R, inherit thus two symmetric monoidal closed structures, and categories enriched on one of them have a 'subadditive' or 'submultiplicative' norm, respectively. Typically, the first case occurs when the norm expresses a cost, the second with Lipschitz norms. This paper is a preparation for a sequel, devoted to 'weighted algebraic topology', an enrichment of directed algebraic topology. The structure of R, and its extension to the complex projective line, might be a first step in abstracting a notion of algebra of weights, linked with physical measures.Comment: Revised version, 16 pages. Some minor correction