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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Alisson Tezzin, Dr Jonte HanceORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Ontological models, as used in the generalised contextuality literature, play a central role in current research on quantum foundations, providing a framework for defining classicality, constructing classical analogues of key quantum phenomena, and examining the ontology of quantum states. In this work, we show that a counterfactual account of L"uders’ rule — which we argue is naturally implied by the mathematical structure of the rule itself — renders such models inherently incompatible with the quantum formalism. This incompatibility arises because the counterfactual update requires ontological models to update their states according to conditional probability, which in turn which in turn renders predictions of sequential measurements order-independent. This implies that ontological models, even contextual ones, must either act differently to what we would expect given (this, typically implicitly-assumed account of) quantum state update rule, or cannot model quantum behaviour.
Author(s): Tezzin A, Amaral B, Hance JR
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Physical Review A
Year: 2025
Volume: 112
Online publication date: 10/11/2025
Acceptance date: 14/10/2025
Date deposited: 14/10/2025
ISSN (print): 2469-9934
ISSN (electronic): 2469-9926
Publisher: American Physical Society
URL: https://doi.org/10.1103/65zd-1lys
DOI: 10.1103/65zd-1lys
ePrints DOI: 10.57711/9jfw-y885
Data Access Statement: No data were created or analyzed in this study.
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