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arXiv:1102.4467 · Physical Review A

Relaxed Bell inequalities and Kochen-Specker theorems

Michael J. W. Hall

Published Aug 2, 2011• 172 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The combination of various physically plausible properties, such as no signaling, determinism, and experimental free will, is known to be incompatible with quantum correlations. Hence, these properties must be individually or jointly relaxed in any model of such correlations. The necessary degrees of relaxation are quantified here via natural distance and information-theoretic measures. This allows quantitative comparisons between different models in terms of the resources, such as the number of bits of randomness, communication, and/or correlation, that they require. For example, measurement dependence is a relatively strong resource for modeling singlet-state correlations, with only 1/15 of one bit of correlation required between measurement settings and the underlying variable. It is shown how various ``relaxed'' Bell inequalities may be obtained, which precisely specify the complementary degrees of relaxation required to model any given violation of a standard Bell inequality. The robustness of a class of Kochen-Specker theorems, to relaxation of measurement independence, is also investigated. It is shown that a theorem of Mermin remains valid unless measurement independence is relaxed by 1/3. The Conway-Kochen ``free will'' theorem and a result of Hardy are less robust, failing if measurement independence is relaxed by only 6.5% and 4.5%, respectively. An appendix shows that existence of an outcome-independent model is equivalent to existence of a deterministic model.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.84.022102

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The combination of various physically plausible properties, such as no signaling, determinism, and experimental free will, is known to be incompatible with quantum correlations. Hence, these properties must be individually or jointly relaxed in any model of such correlations. The necessary degrees of relaxation are quantified here via natural distance and information-theoretic measures. This allows quantitative comparisons between different models in terms of the resources, such as the number of bits of randomness, communication, and/or correlation, that they require. For example, measurement dependence is a relatively strong resource for modeling singlet-state correlations, with only 1/15 of one bit of correlation required between measurement settings and the underlying variable. It is shown how various relaxed'' Bell inequalities may be obtained, which precisely specify the complementary degrees of relaxation required to model any given violation of a standard Bell inequality. The robustness of a class of Kochen-Specker theorems, to relaxation of measurement independence, is also investigated. It is shown that a theorem of Mermin remains valid unless measurement independence is relaxed by 1/3. The Conway-Kochen free will'' theorem and a result of Hardy are less robust, failing if measurement independence is relaxed by only 6.5% and 4.5%, respectively. An appendix shows that existence of an outcome-independent model is equivalent to existence of a deterministic model.
The derivation of Bell inequalities requires an assumption of measurement independence, related to the amount of free will experimenters have in choosing measurement settings. Violation of these inequalities by singlet state correlations brings this assumption into question. A simple measure of the degree of measurement independence is defined for correlation models, and it is shown that all spin correlations of a singlet state can be modeled via giving up just 14% of measurement independence. The underlying model is deterministic and no signaling. It may thus be favorably compared with other underlying models of the singlet state, which require maximum indeterminism or maximum signaling. A local deterministic model is also given that achieves the maximum possible violation of the well-known Bell-Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality, at a cost of only 1/3 of measurement independence.
Bell's inequality was originally derived under the assumption that experimenters are free to select detector settings independently of any local ``hidden variables'' that might affect the outcomes of measurements on entangled particles. This assumption has come to be known as ``measurement independence'' (also referred to as ``freedom of choice'' or ``settings independence''). For a two-setting, two-outcome Bell test, we derive modified Bell inequalities that relax measurement independence, for either or both observers, while remaining locally causal. We describe the loss of measurement independence for each observer using the parameters M1{M}_{1}M1​ and M2{M}_{2}M2​, as defined by Hall in 2010, and also by a more complete description that adds two new parameters, which we call $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{{M}_{1}}$ and $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{{M}_{2}}$, deriving a modified Bell inequality for each description. These ``relaxed'' inequalities subsume those considered in previous work as special cases, and quantify how much the assumption of measurement independence needs to be relaxed in order for a locally causal model to produce a given violation of the standard Bell-Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (Bell-CHSH) inequality. We show that both relaxed Bell inequalities are tight bounds on the CHSH parameter by constructing locally causal models that saturate them. For any given Bell inequality violation, the new two-parameter and four-parameter models each require significantly less mutual information between the hidden variables and measurement settings than previous models. We conjecture that the new models, with optimal parameters, require the minimum possible mutual information for a given Bell violation. We further argue that, contrary to various claims in the literature, relaxing freedom of choice need not imply superdeterminism.
When a measurement is compatible with each of two other measurements that are incompatible with one another, these define distinct contexts for the given measurement. The Kochen–Specker theorem rules out models of quantum theory that satisfy a particular assumption of context-independence: that sharp measurements are assigned outcomes both deterministically and independently of their context. This notion of noncontextuality is not suited to a direct experimental test because realistic measurements always have some degree of unsharpness due to noise. However, a generalized notion of noncontextuality has been proposed that is applicable to any experimental procedure, including unsharp measurements, but also preparations as well, and for which a quantum no-go result still holds. According to this notion, the model need only specify a probability distribution over the outcomes of a measurement in a context-independent way, rather than specifying a particular outcome. It also implies novel constraints of context-independence for the representation of preparations. In this article, we describe a general technique for translating proofs of the Kochen–Specker theorem into inequality constraints on realistic experimental statistics, the violation of which witnesses the impossibility of a noncontextual model. We focus on algebraic state-independent proofs, using the Peres–Mermin square as our illustrative example. Our technique yields the necessary and sufficient conditions for a particular set of correlations (between the preparations and the measurements) to admit a noncontextual model. The inequalities thus derived are demonstrably robust to noise. We specify how experimental data must be processed in order to achieve a test of these inequalities. We also provide a criticism of prior proposals for experimental tests of noncontextuality based on the Peres–Mermin square.
Bell inequalities or Bell-like experiments are supposed to test hidden variable theories based on three intuitive assumptions: determinism, locality and measurement independence. If one of the assumptions of Bell inequality is properly relaxed, the probability distribution of the singlet state, for example, can be reproduced by a hidden variable model. Models that deal with the relaxation of some condition above, with more than one hidden variable, have been studied in the literature nowadays. In this work the relation between the number of hidden variables and the degree of relaxation necessary to reproduce the singlet correlations is investigated. For the examples studied, it is shown that the increase of the number of hidden variables does not allow for more efficiency in the reproduction of quantum correlations.
Quantum mechanics is a nonlocal theory, but not as nonlocal as the no-signalling principle allows. However, there exist quantum correlations that exhibit maximal nonlocality: they are as nonlocal as any nonsignalling correlation and thus have a local content, quantified by the fraction pL{p}_{L}pL​ of events admitting a local description, equal to zero. We exploit the known link between the Kochen-Specker and Bell theorems to derive a maximal violation of a Bell inequality from every Kochen-Specker proof. We then show that these Bell inequalities lead to experimental bounds on the local content of quantum correlations that are significantly better than those based on other constructions. We perform the experimental demonstration of a Bell test originating from the Peres-Mermin Kochen-Specker proof, providing an upper bound on the local content ${p}_{L}\ensuremath{\lesssim}0.22$.
Nonlocality and contextuality are at the root of conceptual puzzles in quantum mechanics, and they are key resources for quantum advantage in information-processing tasks.Bell nonlocality is best understood as the incompatibility between quantum correlations and the classical theory of causality, applied to relativistic causal structure.Contextuality, on the other hand, is on a more controversial foundation.In this work, I provide a common conceptual ground between nonlocality and contextuality as violations of classical causality.First, I show that Bell inequalities can be derived solely from the assumptions of no signaling and no fine-tuning of the causal model.This removes two extra assumptions from a recent result from Wood and Spekkens and, remarkably, does not require any assumption related to independence of measurement settings-unlike all other derivations of Bell inequalities.I then introduce a formalism to represent contextuality scenarios within causal models and show that all classical causal models for violations of a Kochen-Specker inequality require fine-tuning.Thus, the quantum violation of classical causality goes beyond the case of spacelike-separated systems and already manifests in scenarios involving single systems.