Sufficiency of the counterfactual account of L\"uders' rule to rule out ontological models of quantum mechanics

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a counterfactual interpretation of L"uders' rule conflicts with the core structure of ontological models in quantum mechanics, challenging their ability to accurately represent quantum phenomena.

Contribution

It shows that the counterfactual account of L"uders' rule makes ontological models incompatible with quantum formalism, highlighting a fundamental limitation.

Findings

Counterfactual L"uders' rule implies order-independent predictions.

Ontological models must deviate from quantum state update expectations.

Such models cannot fully capture quantum sequential measurement behavior.

Abstract

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.