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arXiv:2001.00188 · Quantum

The Platonic solids and fundamental tests of quantum mechanics

Armin Tavakoli, Nicolas Gisin

Published Jul 9, 2020• 19 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The Platonic solids is the name traditionally given to the five regular convex polyhedra, namely the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the cube, the icosahedron and the dodecahedron. Perhaps strongly boosted by the towering historical influence of their namesake, these beautiful solids have, in well over two millennia, transcended traditional boundaries and entered the stage in a range of disciplines. Examples include natural philosophy and mathematics from classical antiquity, scientific modeling during the days of the European scientific revolution and visual arts ranging from the renaissance to modernity. Motivated by mathematical beauty and a rich history, we consider the Platonic solids in the context of modern quantum mechanics. Specifically, we construct Bell inequalities whose maximal violations are achieved with measurements pointing to the vertices of the Platonic solids. These Platonic Bell inequalities are constructed only by inspecting the visible symmetries of the Platonic solids. We also construct Bell inequalities for more general polyhedra and find a Bell inequality that is more robust to noise than the celebrated Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt Bell inequality. Finally, we elaborate on the tension between mathematical beauty, which was our initial motivation, and experimental friendliness, which is necessary in all empirical sciences.

DOI
10.22331/q-2020-07-09-293

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The Platonic solids is the name traditionally given to the five regular convex polyhedra, namely the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the cube, the icosahedron and the dodecahedron. Perhaps strongly boosted by the towering historical influence of their namesake, these beautiful solids have, in well over two millennia, transcended traditional boundaries and entered the stage in a range of disciplines. Examples include natural philosophy and mathematics from classical antiquity, scientific modeling during the days of the European scientific revolution and visual arts ranging from the renaissance to modernity. Motivated by mathematical beauty and a rich history, we consider the Platonic solids in the context of modern quantum mechanics. Specifically, we construct Bell inequalities whose maximal violations are achieved with measurements pointing to the vertices of the Platonic solids. These Platonic Bell inequalities are constructed only by inspecting the visible symmetries of the Platonic solids. We also construct Bell inequalities for more general polyhedra and find a Bell inequality that is more robust to noise than the celebrated Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt Bell inequality. Finally, we elaborate on the tension between mathematical beauty, which was our initial motivation, and experimental friendliness, which is necessary in all empirical sciences.
Abstract This chapter presents a detailed discussion of Bell inequalities and their experimental tests. Starting from the Aharonov-Bohm version of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox, we review EPR’s criteria for realism and completeness and Bell’s locality condition, before deriving the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequality. This is followed by an exposition on Bell’s original inequality and other Bell inequalities by Wigner, as well as Clauser and Horne. We then discuss the milestones in the experimental violation of Bell inequalities, from the experiment of Freedman and Clauser in the 1970s, to the efforts of Aspect et al. in the 1980s, the experiments by the teams of Zeilinger and Gisin in the 1990s, and culminating the loophole-free tests in 2015. Finally we turn to a brief discussion of the interpretations of quantum mechanics, focusing on contrasting the realist views held by, e.g., Einstein and Bell, and the informational views with proponents such as Brukner and Zeilinger
In this paper we study the Platonic Bell inequalities for all possible dimensions. There are five Platonic solids in three dimensions, but there are also solids with Platonic properties (also known as regular polyhedra) in four and higher dimensions. The concept of Platonic Bell inequalities in the three-dimensional Euclidean space was introduced by Tavakoli and Gisin [Quantum 4, 293 (2020)]. For any three-dimensional Platonic solid, an arrangement of projective measurements is associated where the measurement directions point toward the vertices of the solids. For the higher dimensional regular polyhedra, we use the correspondence of the vertices to the measurements in the abstract Tsirelson space. We give a remarkably simple formula for the quantum violation of all the Platonic Bell inequalities, which we prove to attain the maximum possible quantum violation of the Bell inequalities, i.e. the Tsirelson bound. To construct Bell inequalities with a large number of settings, it is crucial to compute the local bound efficiently. In general, the computation time required to compute the local bound grows exponentially with the number of measurement settings. We find a method to compute the local bound exactly for any bipartite two-outcome Bell inequality, where the dependence becomes polynomial whose degree is the rank of the Bell matrix. To show that this algorithm can be used in practice, we compute the local bound of a 300-setting Platonic Bell inequality based on the halved dodecaplex. In addition, we use a diagonal modification of the original Platonic Bell matrix to increase the ratio of quantum to local bound. In this way, we obtain a four-dimensional 60-setting Platonic Bell inequality based on the halved tetraplex for which the quantum violation exceeds the 2 ratio.
We discuss the relationship between the Bogoliubov transformations, squeezed states, entanglement, and maximum violation of the Bell-Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (Bell-CHSH) inequality. In particular, we point out that the construction of the four bounded operators entering the Bell-CHSH inequality can be worked out in a simple and general way, covering a large variety of models, ranging from quantum mechanism to relativistic quantum field theories. Various examples are employed to illustrate the above mentioned framework. We start by considering a pair of entangled spin-one particles and a squeezed oscillator in quantum mechanics, moving then to the relativistic complex quantum scalar field and to the analysis of the vacuum state in Minkowski space-time in terms of the left and right Rindler modes. In the latter case, the Bell-CHSH inequality turns out to be parametrized by the Unruh temperature.
Among the various "no-go theorems" in the foundations of quantum mechanics, Bell inequalities are among the few, which do not implicitly rely on the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics. Instead, Bell inequalities are commonly understood to rest on Kolmogorov's theory of probability and a "locality" assumption. Physical evidence supporting their violation is hence taken as evidence against at least one of these two assumptions. This work provides a comprehensive analysis of the physical debate on Bell inequalities from the point of view of Kolmogorov's theory of probability, focusing on the Bell-Clauser-Horn-Shimony-Holt inequality (BCHSH inequality). The central contribution is the motivation and mathematical study of the notion of contextuality in Bell experiments: in so-called contextual Bell models the detectors themselves behave randomly and the distribution of the random detector parameters depends on the chosen detector settings. It is shown how even "classical" Bell experiments motivate such a description. The need to account for contextuality was pointed out before by de la Peña, Cetto, Brody, Lochak, Bohm, Hiley and others. A broad class of contextual models is proven to satisfy the BCHSH inequality, thereby generalizing a previous result by Gill and Lambare. Nonetheless, even under strong locality requirements, contextual Bell models may violate the BCHSH inequality: based on work by Popescu and Rohrlich, we consider a "proof of concept" example exhibiting the maximum possible violation. Contrary to the much debated "loopholes" in empirical tests of Bell inequalities, contextuality thus reveals a conceptual misunderstanding in the physical conclusions commonly drawn from Bell inequality violations.
A thorough study of regular and quasi-regular polyhedra shows that the symmetries of these polyhedra identically describe the quantization of orbital angular momentum, of spin, and of total angular momentum, a fact which permits one to assign quantum states at the vertices of these polyhedra assumed as the average particle positions. Furthermore, if the particles are fermions, their wave function is anti-symmetric and its maxima are identically the same as those of repulsive particles, e.g., on a sphere like the spherical shape of closed shells, which implies equilibrium of these particles having average positions at the aforementioned maxima. Such equilibria on a sphere are solely satisfied at the vertices of regular and quasi-regular polyhedra which can be associated with the most probable forms of shells both in Nuclear Physics and in Atomic Cluster Physics when the constituent atoms possess half integer spins. If the average sizes of the constituent particles are known, then the average sizes of the resulting shells become known as well. This association of Symmetry with Quantum Mechanics leads to many applications and excellent results.