An approach to p-adic qubits from irreducible representations of SO(3)p

Abstract

We introduce the notion of a p-adic quantum bit ( p-qubit) in the context of the p-adic quantum mechanics initiated and developed after the seminal paper of Volovich [Theor. Math. Phys. 71, 574 (1987)]. In this approach, physics takes place in a three-dimensional p-adic space rather than Euclidean space. Based on our prior work describing the p-adic special orthogonal group [Di Martino et al., arXiv:2104.06228 [math.NT] (2021)], we outline a program to classify its continuous unitary projective representations, which can be interpreted as a theory of p-adic angular momentum. The p-adic quantum bit arises from the irreducible representations of minimal nontrivial dimension two, of which we construct examples for all primes p.