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arXiv:1303.3837 · Physical Review A

Tests against noncontextual models with measurement disturbances

Jochen Szangolies, Matthias Kleinmann, Otfried Gühne

Published May 6, 2013• 19 citations
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Abstract

The testability of the Kochen-Specker theorem is a subject of ongoing controversy. A central issue is that experimental implementations relying on sequential measurements cannot achieve perfect compatibility between the measurements and that therefore the notion of noncontextuality does not apply. We demonstrate by an explicit model that such compatibility violations may yield a violation of noncontextuality inequalities, even if we assume that the incompatibilities merely originate from context-independent noise. We show, however, that this problem can be circumvented by combining the ideas behind Leggett-Garg inequalities with those of the Kochen-Specker theorem.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.87.050101

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The testability of the Kochen-Specker theorem is a subject of ongoing controversy. A central issue is that experimental implementations relying on sequential measurements cannot achieve perfect compatibility between the measurements and that therefore the notion of noncontextuality does not apply. We demonstrate by an explicit model that such compatibility violations may yield a violation of noncontextuality inequalities, even if we assume that the incompatibilities merely originate from context-independent noise. We show, however, that this problem can be circumvented by combining the ideas behind Leggett-Garg inequalities with those of the Kochen-Specker theorem.
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.
The Kochen-Specker theorem demonstrates that it is not possible to reproduce the predictions of quantum theory in terms of a hidden variable model where the hidden variables assign a value to every projector deterministically and noncontextually. A noncontextual value assignment to a projector is one that does not depend on which other projectors-the context-are measured together with it. Using a generalization of the notion of noncontextuality that applies to both measurements and preparations, we propose a scheme for deriving inequalities that test whether a given set of experimental statistics is consistent with a noncontextual model. Unlike previous inequalities inspired by the Kochen-Specker theorem, we do not assume that the value assignments are deterministic and therefore in the face of a violation of our inequality, the possibility of salvaging noncontextuality by abandoning determinism is no longer an option. Our approach is operational in the sense that it does not presume quantum theory: a violation of our inequality implies the impossibility of a noncontextual model for any operational theory that can account for the experimental observations, including any successor to quantum theory.
It has been argued that any test of quantum contextuality is nullified by the fact that perfect orthogonality and perfect compatibility cannot be achieved in finite precision experiments. We introduce experimentally testable two-qutrit violations of inequalities for noncontextual theories in which compatibility is guaranteed by the fact that measurements are performed on separated qutrits. The inequalities are inspired by the basic building block of the Kochen-Specker proof of quantum contextuality for a qutrit, despite the fact that their proof is completely independent of it.
A characterization of noncontextual models which fall within the ambit of Fine's theorem is provided. In particular, the equivalence between the existence of three notions is made explicit: a joint probability distribution over the outcomes of all the measurements considered, a measurement-noncontextual and outcome-deterministic (or KS-noncontextual, where KS stands for Kochen-Specker) model for these measurements, and a measurement-noncontextual and factorizable model for them. A KS inequality, therefore, is implied by each of these three notions. Following this characterization of noncontextual models that fall within the ambit of Fine's theorem, nonfactorizable noncontextual models which lie outside the domain of Fine's theorem are considered. While outcome determinism for projective (sharp) measurements in quantum theory can be shown to follow from the assumption of preparation noncontextuality, such a justification is not available for nonprojective (unsharp) measurements which ought to admit outcome-indeterministic response functions. The Liang-Spekkens-Wiseman (LSW) inequality is cited as an example of a noncontextuality inequality that should hold in any noncontextual model of quantum theory without assuming factorizability. Three other noncontextuality inequalities, which turn out to be equivalent to the LSW inequality under relabelings of measurement outcomes, are derived for Specker's scenario. The polytope of correlations admissible in this scenario, given the no-disturbance condition, is characterized.
When it isn't possible to tell two distinct experimental procedures apart purely from their input/output statistics, then it seems a plausible hypothesis that the two procedures must be physically identical. We call such a hypothesis "noncontextuality", an instance of Leibniz's principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Read in the contrapositive, this hypothesis entails that any physical distinctions between two experimental procedures must necessarily lead to a difference in their operational statistics. The results I present in this thesis concern the failure of this hypothesis -- a failure dubbed "contextuality" -- when one tries to embed an operational theory (such as quantum theory) in the ontological models framework. The Kochen-Specker theorem demonstrates the failure of noncontextuality for deterministic ontological models of quantum theory, i.e., those ontological models where the ontic/physical state of the system fixes the outcome of any projective measurement on the system in a deterministic manner. This thesis goes beyond the Kochen-Specker (KS) theorem by asking what operational facts must be verified in experiments to conclude that Nature does not admit noncontextual ontological models, not even indeterministic ones. This leads to noncontextuality inequalities that are robust to noise in the preparations and measurements. In the particular case of quantum theory, these inequalities are meaningful even when unsharp measurements (or POVMs) are allowed, a feature not shared by the traditional approach to KS-noncontextuality where unsharp measurements are excluded by fiat: allowing them renders even trivial POVMs (proportional to identity) maximally KS-contextual. The sense in which trivial POVMs are indeed "trivial" (or "noncontextual") is clear in our approach: they are simply too noisy to lead to violation of our noncontextuality inequalities.