Operational causality in spacetime

Abstract

The no-signaling principle preventing superluminal communication is a limiting paradigm for physical theories. Within the information-theoretic framework it is commonly understood in terms of admissible correlations in composite systems. Here we unveil its complementary incarnation---the ''dynamical no-signaling principle''---which forbids superluminal signaling via measurements on simple physical objects (e.g., particles) evolving in time. We show that it imposes strong constraints on admissible models of dynamics. The posited principle is universal; it can be applied to any theory (classical, quantum, or postquantum) with well-defined rules for calculating detection statistics in spacetime. As an immediate application we show how one could exploit the Schr\"odinger equation to establish a fully operational superluminal protocol in the Minkowski spacetime. This example illustrates how the principle can be used to identify the limits of applicability of a given model of quantum or postquantum dynamics.