In the recent years self-testing has grown into a rich and active area of study with applications ranging from practical verification of quantum devices to deep complexity theoretic results. Self-testing allows a classical verifier to deduce which quantum measurements and on what state are used, for example, by provers Alice and Bob in a nonlocal game. Hence, self-testing as well as its noise-tolerant cousin – robust self-testing – are desirable features for a nonlocal game to have.Contrary to what one might expect, we have a rather incomplete understanding of if and how self-testing could fail to hold. In particular, could it be that every 2-party nonlocal game or Bell inequality with a quantum advantage certifies the presence of a specific quantum state? Also, is it the case that every self-testing result can be turned robust with enough ingeniuty and effort? We answer these questions in the negative by providing simple and fully explicit counterexamples. To this end, given two nonlocal games G1 and G2 , we introduce the (G1∨G2) -game, in which the players get pairs of questions and choose which game they want to play. The players win if they choose the same game and win it with the answers they have given. Our counterexamples are based on this game and we believe this class of games to be of independent interest.
In the recent years self-testing has grown into a rich and active area of study with applications ranging from practical verification of quantum devices to deep complexity theoretic results. Self-testing allows a classical verifier to deduce which quantum measurements and on what state are used, for example, by provers Alice and Bob in a nonlocal game. Hence, self-testing as well as its noise-tolerant cousin – robust self-testing – are desirable features for a nonlocal game to have.Contrary to what one might expect, we have a rather incomplete understanding of if and how self-testing could fail to hold. In particular, could it be that every 2-party nonlocal game or Bell inequality with a quantum advantage certifies the presence of a specific quantum state? Also, is it the case that every self-testing result can be turned robust with enough ingeniuty and effort? We answer these questions in the negative by providing simple and fully explicit counterexamples. To this end, given two nonlocal games G1 and G2 , we introduce the (G1∨G2) -game, in which the players get pairs of questions and choose which game they want to play. The players win if they choose the same game and win it with the answers they have given. Our counterexamples are based on this game and we believe this class of games to be of independent interest.
Quantum information has the potential to disrupt the present computational landscape. Much of this potential rests on the existence of efficient quantum algorithms for classically intractable problems and of quantum cryptographic protocols for tasks that are provably impossible to realize classically. At the heart of many quantum advantages is one of the most counterintuitive features of quantum mechanics, known as entanglement. The central motivating question of this thesis is the following: if quantum devices will perform tasks that are beyond the reach of classical devices, can we hope to certify that they are performing these tasks correctly? Bell's theorem, a landmark result in physics, provides a partial answer to this question: it asserts that measurements on spatially isolated, but entangled, particles can result in outcomes that are correlated in a way that cannot be explained by any local hidden variable theory (such as Newtonian physics). A direct operational consequence of this theorem is that one can devise a statistical test to certify the presence of entanglement (and hence of genuine quantumness). Remarkably, nature allows us to take this certification one step further: in some cases, the correlation of measurement outcomes is sufficient to single out a unique quantum setup compatible with this correlation. This phenomenon is often referred to as self-testing, and is the central topic of this thesis. In the first part of this thesis, we review the basic terminology and results in the theory of self-testing. We then explore a concrete application to the problem of verifiably delegating a quantum computation. Our main technical contribution is a test that robustly certifies products of single-qubit Clifford measurements on many EPR pairs. We employ this test to obtain a protocol which allows a classical user to verifiably delegate her quantum computation to two spatially isolated quantum servers. The overall complexity of our protocol is near-optimal, requiring resources that scale almost linearly in the size of the circuit being delegated. In the second part of this thesis, the driving question is the following: what is the class of quantum states and measurements that can be certified through self-testing? Does self-testing only apply to a few special cases, like EPR pairs or copies of EPR pairs, or are these instances of a more general phenomenon? One of the main results of this thesis is that we settle this question for the case of bipartite states. We show the existence of a self-testing correlation for any pure bipartite entangled state of any finite local dimension. We then move on to explore the multipartite case, and we show that a significantly larger class of states can be self-tested than was previously known. This includes all multipartite partially entangled GHZ states, and more generally all multipartite qudit states which admit a Schmidt decomposition. In the final part of this thesis, we explore connections of the theory of self-testing to basic questions about entanglement and quantum correlation sets. In particular, we set out to understand the expressive power of infinite-dimensional quantum systems. We consider two questions: can spatially isolated quantum systems of infinite dimension produce correlations that are unattainable by finite-dimensional systems? Does there exist a correlation that cannot be attained exactly by spatially isolated quantum systems (not even infinite-dimensional ones), but can be approximated arbitrarily well by a sequence of finite or infinite-dimensional systems? The first question was posed by Tsirelson in 1993, and its answer has been elusive. One of the main results of this thesis is a resolution of this question. The second question is better known as the "non-closure of the set of quantum correlations", and was answered affirmatively in a breakthrough of Slofstra. We give a new elementary proof of this result which leverages one of our self-testing results and a phenomenon known as embezzlement.
Self-testing certifies quantum states and measurements from observed correlations alone, without requiring a description of the devices that produce them. In this work we establish, to the best of our knowledge, the first robust self-test of the full continuous family of measurements generated by Majorana operators. We achieve this by showing that the Grothendieck game, a two-player nonlocal game in which the players receive directions on a sphere and return binary answers, is a self-test of Majorana observables. That is, any near-optimal performance certifies an entire continuously parameterized family of quantum measurements. We further extend this certification to products of Majorana observables, obtaining a robust self-test of the spin representation of the continuous pin group.
Self-testing is a method to verify that one has a particular quantum state from purely classical statistics. For practical applications, such as device-independent delegated verifiable quantum computation, it is crucial that one self-tests multiple Bell states in parallel while keeping the quantum capabilities required of one side to a minimum. In this work, we use the $3\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}n$ magic rectangle games (generalizations of the magic square game) to obtain a self-test for n Bell states where the one side needs only to measure single-qubit Pauli observables. The protocol requires small input sizes [constant for Alice and O(log2n) bits for Bob] and is robust with robustness $O({n}^{5/2}\sqrt{\ensuremath{\varepsilon}})$, where $\ensuremath{\varepsilon}$ is the closeness of the ideal (perfect) correlations to those observed. To achieve the desired self-test, we introduce a one-side-local quantum strategy for the magic square game that wins with certainty, we generalize this strategy to the family of $3\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}n$ magic rectangle games, and we supplement these nonlocal games with extra check rounds (of single and pairs of observables).
Self-testing is a method with which a classical user can certify the state and measurements of quantum systems in a device-independent way. In particular, self-testing of entangled states is of great importance in quantum information processing. An understandable example is that the maximal violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality necessarily implies that the bipartite system shares a singlet. One essential question in self-testing is that, when one observes a nonmaximum violation, how far is the tested state from the target state (which maximally violates a certain Bell inequality)? The answer to this question describes the robustness of the used self-testing criterion, which is highly important in a practical sense. Recently, J. Kaniewski derived two analytic self-testing bounds for bipartite and tripartite systems. In this Letter, we experimentally investigate these two bounds with high-quality two-qubit and three-qubit entanglement sources. The results show that these bounds are valid for various entangled states that we prepared. Thereby, a proof-of-concept demonstration of robust self-testing is achieved, which improves on the previous results significantly.
Self-testing is a method to characterise an arbitrary quantum system based only on its classical input-output correlations, and plays an important role in device-independent quantum information processing as well as quantum complexity theory. Prior works on self-testing require the assumption that the system’s state is shared among multiple parties that only perform local measurements and cannot communicate. Here, we replace the setting of multiple non-communicating parties, which is difficult to enforce in practice, by a single computationally bounded party. Specifically, we construct a protocol that allows a classical verifier to robustly certify that a single computationally bounded quantum device must have prepared a Bell pair and performed single-qubit measurements on it, up to a change of basis applied to both the device’s state and measurements. This means that under computational assumptions, the verifier is able to certify the presence of entanglement, a property usually closely associated with two separated subsystems, inside a single quantum device. To achieve this, we build on techniques first introduced by Brakerski et al. (2018) and Mahadev (2018) which allow a classical verifier to constrain the actions of a quantum device assuming the device does not break post-quantum cryptography.
Self-testing is a method to characterise an arbitrary quantum system based only on its classical input-output correlations, and plays an important role in device-independent quantum information processing as well as quantum complexity theory. Prior works on self-testing require the assumption that the system’s state is shared among multiple parties that only perform local measurements and cannot communicate. Here, we replace the setting of multiple non-communicating parties, which is difficult to enforce in practice, by a single computationally bounded party. Specifically, we construct a protocol that allows a classical verifier to robustly certify that a single computationally bounded quantum device must have prepared a Bell pair and performed single-qubit measurements on it, up to a change of basis applied to both the device’s state and measurements. This means that under computational assumptions, the verifier is able to certify the presence of entanglement, a property usually closely associated with two separated subsystems, inside a single quantum device. To achieve this, we build on techniques first introduced by Brakerski et al. (2018) and Mahadev (2018) which allow a classical verifier to constrain the actions of a quantum device assuming the device does not break post-quantum cryptography.