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arXiv:0909.2601 · New Journal of Physics

Strong nonlocality: a trade-off between states and measurements

Anthony J. Short, Jonathan Barrett

Published Mar 19, 2010• 57 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Measurements on entangled quantum states can produce outcomes that are nonlocally correlated. But according to Tsirelson's theorem, there is a quantitative limit on quantum nonlocality. It is interesting to explore what would happen if Tsirelson's bound were violated. To this end, we consider a model that allows arbitrary nonlocal correlations, colloquially referred to as 'box world'. We show that while box world allows more highly entangled states than quantum theory, measurements in box world are rather limited. As a consequence there is no entanglement swapping, teleportation or dense coding.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/12/3/033034

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Measurements on entangled quantum states can produce outcomes that are nonlocally correlated. But according to Tsirelson's theorem, there is a quantitative limit on quantum nonlocality. It is interesting to explore what would happen if Tsirelson's bound were violated. To this end, we consider a model that allows arbitrary nonlocal correlations, colloquially referred to as 'box world'. We show that while box world allows more highly entangled states than quantum theory, measurements in box world are rather limited. As a consequence there is no entanglement swapping, teleportation or dense coding.
The outcomes of measurements on entangled quantum systems can be nonlocally correlated. However, while it is easy to write down toy theories allowing arbitrary nonlocal correlations, those allowed in quantum mechanics are limited. Quantum correlations cannot, for example, violate a principle known as macroscopic locality, which implies that they cannot violate Tsirelson's bound. This paper shows that there is a connection between the strength of nonlocal correlations in a physical theory and the structure of the state spaces of individual systems. This is illustrated by a family of models in which local state spaces are regular polygons, where a natural analogue of a maximally entangled state of two systems exists. We characterize the nonlocal correlations obtainable from such states. The family allows us to study the transition between classical, quantum and super-quantum correlations by varying only the local state space. We show that the strength of nonlocal correlations—in particular whether the maximally entangled state violates Tsirelson's bound or not—depends crucially on a simple geometric property of the local state space, known as strong self-duality. This result is seen to be a special case of a general theorem, which states that a broad class of entangled states in probabilistic theories—including, by extension, all bipartite classical and quantum states—cannot violate macroscopic locality. Finally, our results show that models exist that are locally almost indistinguishable from quantum mechanics, but can nevertheless generate maximally nonlocal correlations.
Quantum mechanics is nonlocal, meaning it cannot be described by any classical local hidden variable model. In this thesis we study two aspects of quantum nonlocality. Part I addresses the question of what classical resources are required to simulate nonlocal quantum correlations. We start by constructing new local models for noisy entangled quantum states. These constructions exploit the connection between nonlocality and Grothendieck's inequality, first noticed by Tsirelson. Next, we consider local models augmented by a limited amount of classical communication. After generalizing Bell inequalities to this setting, we show that (i) one bit of communication is sufficient to simulate the correlations of projective measurements on a maximally entangled state of two qubits, and (ii) five bits of communication are sufficient to simulate the joint correlation of two-outcome measurements on any bipartite quantum state. The latter result can be interpreted as a stronger (constrained) version of Grothendieck's inequality. In part II, we investigate the monogamy of nonlocal correlations. In a setting where three parties, A, B, and C, share an entangled quantum state of arbitrary dimension, we: (i) bound the trade-off between AB's and AC's violation of the CHSH inequality, obtaining an intriguing generalization of Tsirelson's bound, and (ii) demonstrate that forcing B and C to be classically correlated prevents A and B from violating certain Bell inequalities. We study not only correlations that arise within quantum theory, but also arbitrary correlations that do not allow signaling between separate groups of parties. These results are based on new techniques for obtaining Tsirelson bounds, or bounds on the quantum value of a Bell inequality, and have applications to interactive proof systems and cryptography.
Boxworld is a toy theory that can generate extremal nonlocal correlations known as PR boxes. These have been well established as an important tool to examine general nonlocal correlations, even beyond the correlations that are possible in quantum theory. We modify boxworld to include new features. The first modification affects the construction of joint systems such that the new theory allows entangled measurements as well as entangled states in contrast to the standard version of boxworld. The extension to multipartite systems and the consequences for entanglement swapping are analysed. Another modification provides continuous transitions between classical probability theory and boxworld, including the algebraic expression for the maximal CHSH violation as a function of the transition parameters.
Entanglement is a central and subtle feature of quantum theory, whose structure and operational behavior can change dramatically when additional physical constraints, such as symmetries or superselection rules, are imposed. Such constraints can give rise to striking and counter-intuitive phenomena, including local broadcasting of entangled states and failures of entanglement monogamy. These effects naturally arise in tomographically nonlocal theories (like real quantum theory, twirled worlds, or fermionic quantum theory), where composite systems possess holistic degrees of freedom that are inaccessible to local measurements. In this work, we study entanglement in such theories within the framework of generalized probabilistic theories. We show that the failure of tomographic locality leads to two qualitatively distinct forms of entanglement, which we term tomographically-local\textit{tomographically-local}tomographically-local entanglement and tomographically-nonlocal\textit{tomographically-nonlocal}tomographically-nonlocal entanglement. We analyze the operational consequences of this distinction, proving that tomographically-nonlocal entanglement is useless for Bell nonlocality, steering, and teleportation, but sufficient for dense coding and perfectly secure data hiding. This framework clarifies the origin of several previously puzzling features of entanglement that arise when tomographic locality fails, as can happen even in quantum theory when one considers fermions or fundamental superselection rules.
We consider an analog of entanglement-swapping for a set of black boxes with the most general nonlocal correlations consistent with relativity (including correlations which are stronger than any attainable in quantum theory). In an attempt to incorporate this phenomenon, we consider expanding the space of objects to include not only correlated boxes, but ``couplers,'' which are an analog for boxes of measurements with entangled eigenstates in quantum theory. Surprisingly, we find that no couplers exist for two binary-input--binary-output boxes, and hence that there is no analog of entanglement swapping for such boxes.
Nonlocality refers to correlations between spatially separated parties that are stronger than those explained by the existence of local hidden variables. Quantum mechanics is known to allow some nonlocal correlations between particles in a phenomena known as entanglement. We explore several aspects of nonlocality in general and how they relate to quantum mechanics. First, we construct a hierarchy of theories with nonlocal correlations stronger than those allowed in quantum mechanics and derive several results about these theories. We show that these theories include codes that can store an amount of information exponential in the number of physical bits used. We use this result to demonstrate an unphysical consequence of theories with stronger-than-quantum correlations: learning even an approximate description of states in such theories would be practically impossible. Next, we consider the difficult problem of determining whether specific correlations are nonlocal. We present a novel learning algorithm and show that it provides an outer bound on the set of local states, and can therefore be used to identify some nonlocal states. Finally, we put nonlocal correlations to work by showing that the entanglement present in the vacuum of a quantum field can be used to detect spacetime curvature. We quantify how the entangling power of the quantum field varies as a function of spacetime curvature.