Non-classical behaviours in the intra-quantum era: applications and perspectives

Quantum information theory is gaining interest in different communities where it can provide new tools for computation and concurrency, security, and communication protocols, as well as methods to deal with cognition and decision-making. All these domains take advantage of properties that characterise the quantum framework such as superposition, entanglement, and contextuality. A necessary step to exploit the potential advantage of quantum information theory is to highlight the resources underlying this advantage in a theory-independent way. Indeed, the sharing of quantum resources beyond the local scale takes place in current information and communication systems, which are grounded on classic resources: synergy between these two domains is relevant to prompt the diffusion of quantum methodologies in real applications. The present contribution aims to explore different domains where non-quantum and quantum resources coexist and non-classicality arises in different forms. Here, the term “non-classicality” may refer to the elaboration of information through classical or hybrid quantum-classical computing, but also to the representation of knowledge and applications to decision-making under uncertainty. The objective of this contribution is to identify common structures and formal methods that can be specified in different domains sharing the same technological framework. In this way, non-classicality can connect such domains and represent, by itself, a type of resource, supporting the definition of new techniques to deal with distributed classical and quantum information.