Correlations that violate a Bell inequality are said to be nonlocal; i.e., they do not admit a local and deterministic explanation. Great effort has been devoted to study how the amount of nonlocality (as measured by a Bell inequality violation) serves to quantify the amount of randomness present in observed correlations. In this work we reverse this research program and ask what do the randomness certification capabilities of a theory tell us about the nonlocality of that theory. We find that, contrary to initial intuition, maximal randomness certification cannot occur in maximally nonlocal theories. We go on and show that quantum theory, in contrast, permits certification of maximal randomness in all dichotomic scenarios. We hence pose the question of whether quantum theory is optimal for randomness; i.e., is it the most nonlocal theory that allows maximal randomness certification? We answer this question in the negative by identifying a larger-than-quantum set of correlations capable of this feat. Not only are these results relevant to understanding quantum mechanics' fundamental features, but also put fundamental restrictions on device-independent protocols based on the no-signaling principle.
Correlations that violate a Bell inequality are said to be nonlocal; i.e., they do not admit a local and deterministic explanation. Great effort has been devoted to study how the amount of nonlocality (as measured by a Bell inequality violation) serves to quantify the amount of randomness present in observed correlations. In this work we reverse this research program and ask what do the randomness certification capabilities of a theory tell us about the nonlocality of that theory. We find that, contrary to initial intuition, maximal randomness certification cannot occur in maximally nonlocal theories. We go on and show that quantum theory, in contrast, permits certification of maximal randomness in all dichotomic scenarios. We hence pose the question of whether quantum theory is optimal for randomness; i.e., is it the most nonlocal theory that allows maximal randomness certification? We answer this question in the negative by identifying a larger-than-quantum set of correlations capable of this feat. Not only are these results relevant to understanding quantum mechanics' fundamental features, but also put fundamental restrictions on device-independent protocols based on the no-signaling principle.
Bell nonlocality is widely viewed as a signature of intrinsic randomness, effectively playing the role of a 'dice' at the heart of many device-independent cryptographic protocols. We show that this connection has a fundamental limitation: there exist Bell inequalities that are maximally violated by quantum correlations yet certify no randomness for any fixed input pair. We develop a systematic construction based on symmetric deterministic extensions of nonlocal games, and use it to obtain explicit examples of such inequalities. We also construct maximally nonlocal quantum correlations that, for every input pair, admit a convex decomposition into strategies with predetermined outputs for those inputs. Our results reveal a strong form of determinism compatible with quantum nonlocality and delineate the limits of device-independent randomness certification.
The outcomes of local measurements made on entangled systems can be certified to be random provided that the generated statistics violate a Bell inequality. This way of producing randomness relies only on a minimal set of assumptions because it is independent of the internal functioning of the devices generating the random outcomes. In this context it is crucial to understand both qualitatively and quantitatively how the three fundamental quantities -- entanglement, non-locality and randomness -- relate to each other. To explore these relationships, we consider the case where repeated (non projective) measurements are made on the physical systems, each measurement being made on the post-measurement state of the previous measurement. In this work, we focus on the following questions: For systems in a given entangled state, how many nonlocal correlations in a sequence can we obtain by measuring them repeatedly? And from this generated sequence of non-local correlations, how many random numbers is it possible to certify? In the standard scenario with a single measurement in the sequence, it is possible to generate non-local correlations between two distant observers only and the amount of random numbers is very limited. Here we show that we can overcome these limitations and obtain any amount of certified random numbers from an entangled pair of qubit in a pure state by making sequences of measurements on it. Moreover, the state can be arbitrarily weakly entangled. In addition, this certification is achieved by near-maximal violation of a particular Bell inequality for each measurement in the sequence. We also present numerical results giving insight on the resistance to imperfections and on the importance of the strength of the measurements in our scheme.
Nonlocal tests on multi-partite quantum correlations form the basis of protocols that certify randomness in a device-independent (DI) way. Such correlations admit a rich structure, making the task of choosing an appropriate test difficult. For example, extremal Bell inequalities are tight witnesses of nonlocality, but achieving their maximum violation places constraints on the underlying quantum system, which can reduce the rate of randomness generation. As a result there is often a trade-off between maximum randomness and the amount of violation of a given Bell inequality. Here, we explore this trade-off for more than two parties. More precisely, we study the maximum amount of randomness that can be certified by correlations with a particular violation of the Mermin-Ardehali-Belinskii-Klyshko (MABK) inequality. For any even number of parties, we find that maximum randomness cannot occur beyond a threshold quantum violation, which increases with the number of parties, and we give a conjectured form of the maximum randomness in terms of the MABK value. We also show that maximum randomness can be obtained for any MABK violation for odd numbers of parties. To obtain our results, we derive new families of Bell inequalities certifying maximum randomness from a technique for randomness certification, which we call "expanding Bell inequalities''. Our technique allows a bipartite Bell expression to be used as a seed, and transformed into a multi-partite Bell inequality tailored for randomness certification, showing how intuition learned in the bipartite case can find use in more complex scenarios.
The outcomes of local measurements made on entangled systems can be certified to be random provided that the generated statistics violate a Bell inequality. This way of producing randomness relies only on a minimal set of assumptions because it is independent of the internal functioning of the devices generating the random outcomes. In this context it is crucial to understand both qualitatively and quantitatively how the three fundamental quantities – entanglement, non-locality and randomness – relate to each other. To explore these relationships, we consider the case where repeated (non projective) measurements are made on the physical systems, each measurement being made on the post-measurement state of the previous measurement. In this work, we focus on the following questions: Given a single entangled system, how many nonlocal correlations in a sequence can we obtain? And from this single entangled system, how many certified random numbers is it possible to generate? In the standard scenario with a single measurement in the sequence, it is possible to generate non-local correlations between two distant observers only and the amount of random numbers is very limited. Here we show that we can overcome these limitations and obtain any amount of certified random numbers from a single entangled pair of qubit in a pure state by making sequences of measurements on it. Moreover, the state can be arbitrarily weakly entangled. In addition, this certification is achieved by near-maximal violation of a particular Bell inequality for each measurement in the sequence. We also present numerical results giving insight on the resistance to imperfections and on the importance of the strength of the measurements in our scheme.
Certifying maximal quantum randomness without assumptions about system dimension remains a pivotal challenge for secure communication and foundational studies. Here, we introduce a generalized framework to directly certify maximal randomness from observed probability distributions across systems with arbitrary user numbers, without relying on the Bell-inequality violations. By analyzing probability distributions directly, we identify a class of quantum states and projective measurements that achieve maximal randomness in bipartite and tripartite scenarios, ensuring practical feasibility. Further analysis reveals a counterintuitive trade-off governing measurement incompatibility among users: sufficient incompatibility for one user permits arbitrarily small incompatibility for others, defying conventional symmetry assumptions in the Bell test. This asymmetry provides a pathway to optimize device-independent protocols by strategically distributing quantum resources. Our results establish a versatile and experimentally accessible route to scalable randomness certification, with implications for quantum cryptography and the physics of nonlocal correlations.
Given a pair of isolated devices that accept random binary inputs and return binary outputs, a user can deduce from the observed data alone if the underlying mechanism can be explained classically. Bell's theorem further states that a classical explanation can be ruled out if the devices perform certain measurements on an entangled quantum state, underpinning the security of cryptographic protocols that are device-independent (DI). For certain protocols, such as those performed in a tight space, it might be difficult to perfectly enforce the non-signaling assumption required in Bell's theorem. This prompts the question: is quantum nonlocality robust to such imperfections? We show that if a binary channel sends a noisy copy of one party's input to the other before any measurements take place, the answer is yes. We completely characterize the vertices and facets of the local polytope in this scenario, and identify Bell inequalities that certify non-signaling quantum correlations. This is possible even when a near perfect copy of the input is sent. We go on to show that the identified inequalities are more robust to depolarizing noise than the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality when certifying DI randomness in this scenario. In addition, we characterize the local polytope when both parties receive a noisy copy of each other's input and make similar conclusions, leaving many new potential Bell inequalities to be explored.