The development of large-scale quantum networks promises to bring a multitude of technological applications as well as shed light on foundational topics, such as quantum nonlocality. It is particularly interesting to consider scenarios where sources within the network are statistically independent, which leads to so-called network nonlocality, even when parties perform fixed measurements. Here we promote certain parties to be trusted and introduce the notion of network steering and network local hidden state (NLHS) models within this paradigm of independent sources. In one direction, we show how the results from Bell nonlocality and quantum steering can be used to demonstrate network steering. We further show that it is a genuinely novel effect by exhibiting unsteerable states that nevertheless demonstrate network steering based upon entanglement swapping yielding a form of activation. On the other hand, we provide no-go results for network steering in a large class of scenarios by explicitly constructing NLHS models.
Steering is a form of quantum nonlocality that is intimately related to the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox that ignited the ongoing discussion of quantum correlations. Within the hierarchy of nonlocal correlations appearing in nature, EPR steering occupies an intermediate position between Bell nonlocality and entanglement. In continuous variable systems, EPR steering correlations have been observed by violation of Reid's EPR inequality, which is based on inferred variances of complementary observables. Here we propose and experimentally test a new criterion based on entropy functions, and show that it is more powerful than the variance inequality for identifying EPR steering. Using the entropic criterion our experimental results show EPR steering, while the variance criterion does not. Our results open up the possibility of observing this type of nonlocality in a wider variety of quantum states.
We prove, modulo a conjecture on quantum steering ellipsoids being true, the existence of the phenomenon of locally inaccessible hidden quantum correlations, that is, the existence of two-particle states whose hidden quantum correlations cannot be revealed by local filters implemented exclusively on one side of the experiment but that can still be revealed when both parties cooperate in applying judiciously chosen local filters. The quantum correlations considered here are the violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequality for Bell nonlocality and the violation of the
F3 inequality for Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering. Specifically, we provide a necessary criterion for guaranteeing the presence of such phenomena for arbitrary two-qubit states. This criterion in turn relies on the conjecture that the maximal violations of CHSH inequality and
F3 inequality are both upper bounded by functions that depend on the magnitude of the quantum steering ellipsoid center. This latter conjecture, although currently lacking an analytical proof, is supported by numerical results. We use this necessary criterion to explicitly show examples of two-qubit states with locally inaccessible hidden quantum correlations and furthermore two-qubit states with locally inaccessible maximal hidden quantum correlations.