Bell nonlocality represents one of the most striking departures of quantum mechanics from classical physics. It shows that correlations between spacelike separated systems allowed by quantum mechanics are stronger than those present in any classical theory. In a recent work [A. Tavakoli, M. Farkas, D. Rosset, J.-D. Bancal, and J. Kaniewski, Sci. Adv. 7, eabc3847 (2021)], a family of Bell functionals tailored to mutually unbiased bases (MUBs) was proposed. For these functionals, the maximal quantum violation is achieved if the two measurements performed by one of the parties are constructed out of MUBs of a fixed dimension. Here, we generalize this construction to an arbitrary incompatible pair of rank-one projective measurements. By constructing a new family of Bell functionals, we show that for any such pair there exists a Bell inequality that is maximally violated by this pair. Moreover, when investigating the robustness of these violations to noise, we demonstrate that the realization which is most robust to noise is not generated by MUBs.
Bell nonlocality represents one of the most striking departures of quantum mechanics from classical physics. It shows that correlations between spacelike separated systems allowed by quantum mechanics are stronger than those present in any classical theory. In a recent work [A. Tavakoli, M. Farkas, D. Rosset, J.-D. Bancal, and J. Kaniewski, Sci. Adv. 7, eabc3847 (2021)], a family of Bell functionals tailored to mutually unbiased bases (MUBs) was proposed. For these functionals, the maximal quantum violation is achieved if the two measurements performed by one of the parties are constructed out of MUBs of a fixed dimension. Here, we generalize this construction to an arbitrary incompatible pair of rank-one projective measurements. By constructing a new family of Bell functionals, we show that for any such pair there exists a Bell inequality that is maximally violated by this pair. Moreover, when investigating the robustness of these violations to noise, we demonstrate that the realization which is most robust to noise is not generated by MUBs.
We examine the problem of exhibiting Bell nonlocality for a two-qudit entangled pure state using a randomly chosen set of mutually unbiased bases (MUBs). Interestingly, even if we employ only two-setting Bell inequalities, we find a significant chance of obtaining a Bell violation if the two parties are individually allowed to measure a sufficient number of MUBs. In particular, for the case of maximally entangled qutrits and ququarts, our numerical estimates indicate that we can obtain near-guaranteed Bell violation by considering only such Bell inequalities. The case of maximally entangled ququints is similar, albeit the chance of ending up with a successful trial decreases somewhat to approximately 99.84. Upon a closer inspection, we find that even all these no-violation instances violate some more-setting Bell inequalities. These results suggest that the experimental tests of Bell nonlocality for these higher-dimensional entangled states remain viable even if the two parties do not share a common reference frame.
One of the major concepts introduced by quantum theory is the compatibility of quantum measurements. There are certain types of measurements that cannot be made at the same time. Thus,we say that measurements are compatible if they can be measured at the same time and others are incompatible. The other major concept of quantum mechanics is that of nonlocality which is one of the most counterintuitive concepts of quantum physics. This major concept is due to John Bell who showed that quantum mechanics is intrinsically non-local. Thus, we speak of violation of Bell's inequalities by quantum mechanics. Today, nonlocality is understood through nonlocal games. A nonlocal game consists of two or more players Alice and Bob playing against a referee. The referee will ask a number of questions to the players who will have to generate a number of answers using a classical or quantum strategy. It turns out that the maximum number of answers that Alice and Bob can generate is intrinsically linked to a tensor norm characterizing the game. In this formalism, the use of classical strategies is related to the norm of the matrix of the game itself, so the violation of Bell's inequalities results in a strict inequality between the tensor norms. The aim of this thesis is to understand the incompatibility of quantum measures and the link with Bell's inequalities. First, we introduced the compatibility of quantum measures from a new point of view, and analyzed the types of noise that can be made to make the system compatible. This new point of view consists in understanding and analyzing the effect of the dimension of the Hilbert space on the incompatibility of measurements. Moreover, in order to make the measurements compatible, we can introduce the effect of a noise. As an application, some states known as MUB are incompatible in nature, we show that even if we add noise to the MUB it remains incompatible, there is an isometry and a Hilbert space of smaller dimension making the MUB compatible. In a second step, we have analyzed the intrinsic link between the incompatibility of quantum measurements and the violation of Bell's inequalities. For this purpose, we considered the framework of non-local games, where Alice's measurements are fixed. It is known that a violation of Bell's inequalities requires the use of incompatible measurements. On the other hand, if Alice wants to know if she will observe a violation of Bell's inequalities if she uses incompatible measures. To do this, she must compute two tensor norms of a tensor constructed from her measurements. These tensorial norms will characterize on the one hand the compatibility of Alice's measurements and on the other hand the violation of Bell's inequalities. In this natural framework, to understand the link between the incompatibility of quantum measurements and the violation of Bell's inequalities, we have to compare the two tensorial norms. Now, it turns out that for the CHSH game these two norms are equal, but it can be shown generally that they are not. We can ask ourselves if there are other types of games satisfying this equality of the tensorial norms? It turns out that we have shown that with sufficient conditions, only the CHSH game with a multiplicative constant gives the equality between the tensor norms.
Bell inequalities are an important tool in device-independent quantum information processing because their violation can serve as a certificate of relevant quantum properties. Probably the best known example of a Bell inequality is due to Clauser, Horne, Shimony and Holt (CHSH), which is defined in the simplest scenario involving two dichotomic measurements and whose all key properties are well understood. There have been many attempts to generalise the CHSH Bell inequality to higher-dimensional quantum systems, however, for most of them the maximal quantum violation---the key quantity for most device-independent applications---remains unknown. On the other hand, the constructions for which the maximal quantum violation can be computed, do not preserve the natural property of the CHSH inequality, namely, that the maximal quantum violation is achieved by the maximally entangled state and measurements corresponding to mutually unbiased bases. In this work we propose a novel family of Bell inequalities which exhibit precisely these properties, and whose maximal quantum violation can be computed analytically. In the simplest scenario it recovers the CHSH Bell inequality. These inequalities involve d measurements settings, each having d outcomes for an arbitrary prime number d ≥ 3 . We then show that in the three-outcome case our Bell inequality can be used to self-test the maximally entangled state of two-qutrits and three mutually unbiased bases at each site. Yet, we demonstrate that in the case of more outcomes, their maximal violation does not allow for self-testing in the standard sense, which motivates the definition of a new weak form of self-testing. The ability to certify high-dimensional MUBs makes these inequalities attractive from the device-independent cryptography point of view.
Mutually unbiased bases capture perfect complementarity between two quantum measurements. Extensions beyond pairwise unbiasedness have been proposed, but essentially no non-trivial higher-order constructions are known. We introduce k-fold unbiased measurements (k-UMs), extending the k-fold unbiased bases notion of [arXiv:1706.04446] from rank-one basis measurements to arbitrary-rank projective measurements, and show that this higher-rank setting supports a much richer theory. We develop the notions of algebraic and spectral k-UMs and prove that they coincide for rank-one measurements and triples of measurements (3-UMs). We establish strong no-go results for higher-order rank-one constructions and three-outcome 3-UMs, but obtain infinitely many higher-rank triples using Hadamard matrices and Clifford algebras. We then give these structures an exact operational interpretation in terms of measurement incompatibility. For 3-UMs with any number of outcomes, we determine their generalised incompatibility robustness exactly and construct an explicit joint measurement for their noisy versions at the compatibility threshold. Finally, we implement the symmetry reduction of the sum-of-squares hierarchy recently introduced in [New J. Phys. 28, 064509 (2026)] and give numerical evidence that the noise thresholds arising from the k-UM analysis may characterise the asymptotic behaviour of this hierarchy. In particular, with very high precision, we numerically show that our constructed four-outcome 3-UMs are among the most incompatible triples of four-outcome measurements.
Quantum measurements based on mutually unbiased bases are commonly used in quantum information processing, as they are generally viewed as being maximally incompatible and complementary. Here we quantify precisely the degree of incompatibility of mutually unbiased bases (MUB) using the notion of noise robustness. Specifically, for sets of k MUB in dimension d, we provide upper and lower bounds on this quantity. Notably, we get a tight bound in several cases, in particular for complete sets of k=d+1 MUB (using the standard construction for d being a prime power). On the way, we also derive a general upper bound on the noise robustness for an arbitrary set of quantum measurements. Moreover, we prove the existence of sets of k MUB that are operationally inequivalent, as they feature different noise robustness, and we provide a lower bound on the number of such inequivalent sets up to dimension 32. Finally, we discuss applications of our results for Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering.
Abstract In the standard Bell experiment, two parties perform local projective measurements on a shared pair of entangled qubits to generate nonlocal correlations. However, these measurements completely destroy the entanglement, rendering the post-measurement state unable for subsequent use. For a long time, it was believed that only unsharp measurements can be used to share quantum correlations. Remarkably, recent research has shown that classical randomness assisted projective measurements are sufficient for sharing nonlocality (Steffinlongo and Tavakoli 2022 Phys. Rev. Lett. 129 230402). Here, by stochastically combining no more than two different projective measurement strategies, we report an experimental observation of double Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequality violations with two measurements in a sequence made on each pair of maximally and partially entangled polarization photons. Our results reveal that the double violation achieved by partially entangled states can be 11 standard deviations larger than that achieved by maximally entangled ones. Our scheme eliminates the requirement for entanglement assistance in previous unsharp-measurement-based sharing schemes, making it experimentally easier. Our work provides possibilities for sharing other types of quantum correlations in various physical systems with projective measurements.