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arXiv:1808.00318 · Physical Review Letters

Strong Quantum Nonlocality without Entanglement

Saronath Halder, Manik Banik, Sristy Agrawal, Somshubhro Bandyopadhyay

Published Feb 1, 2019• 159 citations
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Abstract

Quantum nonlocality is usually associated with entangled states by their violations of Bell-type inequalities. However, even unentangled systems, whose parts may have been prepared separately, can show nonlocal properties. In particular, a set of product states is said to exhibit "quantum nonlocality without entanglement" if the states are locally indistinguishable; i.e., it is not possible to optimally distinguish the states by any sequence of local operations and classical communication. Here, we present a stronger manifestation of this kind of nonlocality in multiparty systems through the notion of local irreducibility. A set of multiparty orthogonal quantum states is defined to be locally irreducible if it is not possible to locally eliminate one or more states from the set while preserving orthogonality of the postmeasurement states. Such a set, by definition, is locally indistinguishable, but we show that the converse does not always hold. We provide the first examples of orthogonal product bases on C^{d}⊗C^{d}⊗C^{d} for d=3, 4 that are locally irreducible in all bipartitions, where the construction for d=3 achieves the minimum dimension necessary for such product states to exist. The existence of such product bases implies that local implementation of a multiparty separable measurement may require entangled resources across all bipartitions.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.122.040403

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Quantum nonlocality is usually associated with entangled states by their violations of Bell-type inequalities. However, even unentangled systems, whose parts may have been prepared separately, can show nonlocal properties. In particular, a set of product states is said to exhibit "quantum nonlocality without entanglement" if the states are locally indistinguishable; i.e., it is not possible to optimally distinguish the states by any sequence of local operations and classical communication. Here, we present a stronger manifestation of this kind of nonlocality in multiparty systems through the notion of local irreducibility. A set of multiparty orthogonal quantum states is defined to be locally irreducible if it is not possible to locally eliminate one or more states from the set while preserving orthogonality of the postmeasurement states. Such a set, by definition, is locally indistinguishable, but we show that the converse does not always hold. We provide the first examples of orthogonal product bases on C^{d}⊗C^{d}⊗C^{d} for d=3, 4 that are locally irreducible in all bipartitions, where the construction for d=3 achieves the minimum dimension necessary for such product states to exist. The existence of such product bases implies that local implementation of a multiparty separable measurement may require entangled resources across all bipartitions.
A set of multipartite orthogonal product states is locally irreducible, if it is not possible to eliminate one or more states from the set by orthogonality-preserving local measurements. An effective way to prove that a set is locally irreducible is to show that only trivial orthogonality-preserving measurement can be performed to this set. In general, it is difficult to show such a orthogonality-preserving measurement must be trivial. In this work, we develop two basic techniques to deal with this problem. Using these techniques, we successfully construct orthogonal product sets (OPSs) in any possible three, four and five-partite systems that are locally irreducible in every bipartition. Moreover, we also show the existence of unextendible product bases (UPBs) with such properties in d⊗d⊗dd\otimes d\otimes dd⊗d⊗d for any d≥3d\geq 3d≥3. Therefore, these OPSs and UPBs exhibit the phenomenon of strong quantum nonlocality without entanglement. Both results solve the open questions given by Halder et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 040403 (2019)] and Yuan et al. [Phys. Rev. A 102, 042228 (2020)]. Our results shed a new light on the strong quantum nonlocality without entanglement.
Abstract Recently, Halder et al (2019 Phys. Rev. Lett. 122 040403) proposed the concept of strong nonlocality without entanglement: an orthogonal set of fully product states in multipartite quantum systems that is locally irreducible for every bipartition of its subsystems. Due to the complexity of the problem, most results are limited to tripartite systems. Here we consider a weaker form of nonlocality which is called local distinguishability based genuine nonlocality. A set of orthogonal multipartite quantum states is said to be genuinely nonlocal if it is locally indistinguishable for every bipartition of the subsystems. In this work, we study how to construct sets of orthogonal product states which are genuinely nonlocal. Firstly, we present a set of product states with simple structure in bipartite systems that is locally indistinguishable. After that, based on a simple observation, we present a general method to construct genuinely nonlocal sets of multipartite product states by using those sets that are genuinely nonlocal but with less parties. As a consequence, we obtain that genuinely nonlocal sets of fully product states exist in any L parties systems ⨂ i = 1 L C d i provided L ⩾ 3 and d i ⩾ 3 for all i .
A set of multipartite orthogonal product states is locally irreducible, if it is not possible to eliminate one or more states from the set by orthogonality-preserving local measurements. An effective way to prove that a set is locally irreducible is to show that only trivial orthogonality-preserving local measurement can be performed to this set. In general, it is difficult to show that such an orthogonality-preserving local measurement must be trivial. In this work, we develop two basic techniques to deal with this problem. Using these techniques, we successfully show the existence of unextendible product bases (UPBs) that are locally irreducible in every bipartition in d ⊗ d ⊗ d for any d ≥ 3 , and 3 ⊗ 3 ⊗ 3 achieves the minimum dimension for the existence of such UPBs. These UPBs exhibit the phenomenon of strong quantum nonlocality without entanglement. Our result solves an open question given by Halder et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 040403 (2019)] and Yuan et al. [Phys. Rev. A 102, 042228 (2020)]. It also sheds new light on the connections between UPBs and strong quantum nonlocality.
A set of orthogonal product states is said to exhibit "quantum nonlocality without entanglement" if it is locally indistinguishable, i.e. no sequence of local operations and classical communication (LOCC) can perfectly discriminate the states. Building on this foundational idea, recent studies have highlighted the phenomenon of "genuine activation of hidden nonlocality", where a set of initially distinguishable orthogonal states becomes locally indistinguishable through orthogonality-preserving LOCC transformations. In this letter, we establish that any complete orthogonal product basis that is initially locally distinguishable remains so under all orthogonality-preserving local projective measurements, thereby ruling out activation via orthogonality-preserving local projective measurements and classical communication. We further introduce and formalise the notions of "strongly local sets", namely locally distinguishable sets that remain non-activable under all bipartitions. Interestingly, the study of "local activability" of distinguishable sets is useful to characterise the boundary between LOCC distinguishability and its irreversible loss in multipartite systems. Our results provide a rigorous structural understanding of local-to-nonlocal transitions in quantum state discrimination.
Recently, based on some quantum states which are locally irreducible in all bipartitions, strong quantum nonlocality has been presented by Halder et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 040403 (2019)]. However, the remaining questions are whether a set of quantum states can reveal strong quantum nonlocality when these states are locally irreducible in all tripartitions or more multipartitions and how to construct strong nonlocality of orthogonal product states in more than tripartite quantum systems. Here we present a general definition of strong quantum nonlocality based on the local irreducibility. Then, using a $3\ensuremath{\bigotimes}3\ensuremath{\bigotimes}3$ quantum system as an example, we show three sets of locally indistinguishable orthogonal product states to explain the general definition of strong quantum nonlocality. Furthermore, in $3\ensuremath{\bigotimes}3\ensuremath{\bigotimes}3\ensuremath{\bigotimes}3$, we construct a set of strong nonlocality of orthogonal product states; these states do not form a complete basis. Our results demonstrate the phenomenon of strong nonlocality without entanglement for the multipartite quantum systems.
Strong quantum nonlocality was introduced recently as a stronger manifestation of nonlocality in multipartite systems through the notion of local irreducibility in all bipartitions. Known existing results for sets of strongly nonlocal orthogonal states are limited to product states. In this paper, based on the Rubik's cube, we give a construction of such sets consisting of entangled states in $d\ensuremath{\bigotimes}d\ensuremath{\bigotimes}d$ for all $d\ensuremath{\ge}3$. Consequently, we answer an open problem given by Halder et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 040403 (2019)], that is, orthogonal entangled bases that are strongly nonlocal do exist. Furthermore, we propose two entanglement-assisted protocols for local discrimination of our results. Each protocol consumes less entanglement resources than the teleportation-based protocol on average. Our results exhibit the phenomenon of strong quantum nonlocality with entanglement.