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arXiv:1610.08514 · Science Advances

Experimental demonstration of nonbilocal quantum correlations

D. J. Saunders, Adam Bennet, Cyril Branciard, Geoff J. Pryde

Published Apr 7, 2017• 84 citations
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Abstract

Quantum mechanics admits correlations that cannot be explained by local realistic models. The most studied models are the standard local hidden variable models, which satisfy the well-known Bell inequalities. To date, most works have focused on bipartite entangled systems. We consider correlations between three parties connected via two independent entangled states. We investigate the new type of so-called "bilocal" models, which correspondingly involve two independent hidden variables. These models describe scenarios that naturally arise in quantum networks, where several independent entanglement sources are used. Using photonic qubits, we build such a linear three-node quantum network and demonstrate nonbilocal correlations by violating a Bell-like inequality tailored for bilocal models. Furthermore, we show that the demonstration of nonbilocality is more noise-tolerant than that of standard Bell nonlocality in our three-party quantum network.

DOI
10.1126/sciadv.1602743

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Quantum mechanics admits correlations that cannot be explained by local realistic models. The most studied models are the standard local hidden variable models, which satisfy the well-known Bell inequalities. To date, most works have focused on bipartite entangled systems. We consider correlations between three parties connected via two independent entangled states. We investigate the new type of so-called "bilocal" models, which correspondingly involve two independent hidden variables. These models describe scenarios that naturally arise in quantum networks, where several independent entanglement sources are used. Using photonic qubits, we build such a linear three-node quantum network and demonstrate nonbilocal correlations by violating a Bell-like inequality tailored for bilocal models. Furthermore, we show that the demonstration of nonbilocality is more noise-tolerant than that of standard Bell nonlocality in our three-party quantum network.
Bell's theorem plays a crucial role in quantum information processing and thus several experimental investigations of Bell inequalities violations have been carried out over the years. Despite their fundamental relevance, however, previous experiments did not consider an ingredient of relevance for quantum networks: the fact that correlations between distant parties are mediated by several, typically independent sources. Here, using a photonic setup, we investigate a quantum network consisting of three spatially separated nodes whose correlations are mediated by two distinct sources. This scenario allows for the emergence of the so-called non-bilocal correlations, incompatible with any local model involving two independent hidden variables. We experimentally witness the emergence of this kind of quantum correlations by violating a Bell-like inequality under the fair-sampling assumption. Our results provide a proof-of-principle experiment of generalizations of Bell's theorem for networks, which could represent a potential resource for quantum communication protocols.
Network Bell experiments give rise to a form of quantum nonlocality that conceptually goes beyond Bell's theorem. We investigate here the simplest network, known as the bilocality scenario. We depart from the typical use of the Bell state measurement in the network central node and instead introduce a family of symmetric isoentangled measurement bases that generalize the so-called "elegant joint measurement." This leads us to report noise-tolerant quantum correlations that elude bilocal variable models. Inspired by these quantum correlations, we introduce network Bell inequalities for the bilocality scenario and show that they admit noise-tolerant quantum violations. In contrast to many previous studies of network Bell inequalities, neither our inequalities nor their quantum violations are based on standard Bell inequalities and standard quantum nonlocality. Moreover, we pave the way for an experimental realization by presenting a simple two-qubit quantum circuit for the implementation of the elegant joint measurement and our generalization.
Quantum correlation between nodes in a network which consist of several independent sources of entanglement and in multipartite entanglement systems are important for general understanding of the nature of nonlocality, quantum information processing and communication. In previous years, demonstrations of network nonlocality for bilocal scenarios have been in the focus. Yet, it has been found that the seminal protocols do not certify entanglement between end nodes, which otherwise require all sources in the network to be of nonlocal nature. This has motivated for development of even stronger concept, called full network nonlocality. Here, we experimentally demonstrate full network nonlocal correlations in a network. Specifically, we use two pairs of polarization entangled qubits created by two separate and independent entanglement sources and a partial Bell state measurement. Our results may pave the way for the use of nonlocality test in quantum communication protocols with a full network nonlocality certification.
In an entanglement swapping scenario, if two sources distributing entangled states between three parties are independent, local correlations lead to a different kind of inequality than the standard Bell inequalities, known as network local models. A highly demanding task is to find out a way to involve many players nontrivially in a quantum network since measurements, in general, disturb the system. To this end, we consider here an alternative way of sharing network nonlocality when two observers initially share a maximally entangled, a nonmaximally entangled and a noisy entangled state. We report that by employing unsharp measurements performed by one of the observers, at most six pairs can sequentially demonstrate the violation of bilocal inequality while a maximum of two pairs of observers can exhibit bi-nonlocality when both the observers perform unsharp measurements. We also find the critical noise involved in unsharp measurements in each round to illustrate the bi-nonlocality for a fixed shared entangled state as a resource. We also connect the entanglement content of the shared state, quantified via von-Neumann entropy for pure states and entanglement of formation for Werner states with the maximum number of rounds showing violation of bilocal inequality. By considering elegant joint measurement at the node such that the entanglement content in the elements of the joint measurement by the third party gets reduced, we observe that the maximum number reduces to two sequential sharing of bi-nonlocality even for the maximally entangled state when the settings at each side are taken to be three and fixed.
Nonclassical correlations arising in complex quantum networks are attracting growing interest, both from a fundamental perspective and for potential applications in information processing. In particular, in an entanglement swapping scenario a new kind of correlations arise, the so-called nonbilocal correlations that are incompatible with local realism augmented with the assumption that the sources of states used in the experiment are independent. In practice, however, bilocality tests impose strict constraints on the experimental setup and in particular to the presence of shared reference frames between the parties. Here, we experimentally address this point showing that false positive nonbilocal quantum correlations can be observed even though the sources of states are independent. To overcome this problem, we propose and demonstrate a scheme for the violation of bilocality that does not require shared reference frames and thus constitutes an important building block for future investigations of quantum correlations in complex networks.
The concept of bilocality was introduced to study the correlations which arise in an entanglement-swapping scenario, where one has two sources which can naturally be taken to be independent. This additional constraint leads to stricter requirements than simply imposing locality, in the form of bilocality inequalities. In this work we consider a natural generalization of the bilocality scenario; namely, the star network consisting of a single central party surrounded by nnn edge parties, each of which shares an independent source with the center. We derive inequalities which are satisfied by all local correlations in this scenario, for the cases when the central party performs (i) two dichotomic measurements (ii) a single Bell-state measurement. We demonstrate quantum violations of these inequalities and study both the robustness to noise and to losses.