Bell non-locality is a fundamental feature of quantum mechanics whereby measurements performed on “spatially separated” quantum systems can exhibit correlations that cannot be understood as revealing predetermined values. This is a special case of the more general phenomenon of “quantum contextuality”, which says that such correlations can occur even when the measurements are not necessarily on separate quantum systems, but are merely “compatible” (i.e. commuting). Crucially, while any non-local game yields an experiment that demonstrates quantum advantage by leveraging the “spatial separation” of two or more devices (and in fact several such demonstrations have been conducted successfully in recent years), the same is not true for quantum contextuality: finding the contextuality analogue of such an experiment is arguably one of the central open questions in the foundations of quantum mechanics. In this work, we show that an arbitrary contextuality game can be compiled into an “operational test of contextuality” involving a single quantum device, by only making the assumption that the device is computationally bounded. Our work is inspired by the recent work of Kalai et al. (STOC '23) that converts any non-local game into a classical test of quantum advantage with a single device. The central idea in their work is to use cryptography to enforce spatial separation within subsystems of a single quantum device. Our work can be seen as using cryptography to enforce “temporal separation”, i.e. to restrict communication between sequential measurements. Beyond contextuality, we employ our ideas to design a “proof of quantumness” that, to the best of our knowledge, is arguably even simpler than the ones proposed in the literature so far.
Bell non-locality is a fundamental feature of quantum mechanics whereby measurements performed on “spatially separated” quantum systems can exhibit correlations that cannot be understood as revealing predetermined values. This is a special case of the more general phenomenon of “quantum contextuality”, which says that such correlations can occur even when the measurements are not necessarily on separate quantum systems, but are merely “compatible” (i.e. commuting). Crucially, while any non-local game yields an experiment that demonstrates quantum advantage by leveraging the “spatial separation” of two or more devices (and in fact several such demonstrations have been conducted successfully in recent years), the same is not true for quantum contextuality: finding the contextuality analogue of such an experiment is arguably one of the central open questions in the foundations of quantum mechanics. In this work, we show that an arbitrary contextuality game can be compiled into an “operational test of contextuality” involving a single quantum device, by only making the assumption that the device is computationally bounded. Our work is inspired by the recent work of Kalai et al. (STOC '23) that converts any non-local game into a classical test of quantum advantage with a single device. The central idea in their work is to use cryptography to enforce spatial separation within subsystems of a single quantum device. Our work can be seen as using cryptography to enforce “temporal separation”, i.e. to restrict communication between sequential measurements. Beyond contextuality, we employ our ideas to design a “proof of quantumness” that, to the best of our knowledge, is arguably even simpler than the ones proposed in the literature so far.
Historically, quantum mechanics has relied on the assumption of non-communicating parties, enforced via space-like separation, to witness the gap between classical and quantum descriptions. This thesis explores the boundaries of the standard Bell non-local scenario, investigating how to preserve this gap when communication is allowed. In particular, this work focuses on restricted communication, multipartite settings, and operator-algebraic formulations. Key contributions of this work include: • Dimensional Constraints: Establishing mathematical maps from standard Bell scenarios to prepare-and-measure scenarios with dimensionally bounded channels, proving that quantum bounds and self-testing properties are preserved. • Cryptographic Constraints: Analyzing compiled non-local games using quantum homomorphic encryption. The research proves asymptotic quantum soundness for all multipartite compiled games and introduces a quantitative hierarchy, similar to the NPA hierarchy, to characterize sequential correlations. • Operational Equivalences: Demonstrating that correlations arising from arbitrary compositions of non-signalling assemblages in multipartite communication schemes always reduce to standard spatial quantum Bell correlations. • Operator-Algebraic Tools: Introducing a novel chain rule for the Radon-Nikodym derivative to dilate chains of completely-positive maps, alongside the construction of a universal C*-algebra for sequential measurements. Overall, the manuscript unifies concepts from quantum foundations, complexity theory, and operator algebras to provide a rigorous mathematical framework for characterizing and certifying multipartite sequential quantum correlations.
Quantum entanglement is the defining feature of composite quantum systems, underpinning correlations beyond classical randomness and enabling quantum communication, cryptography, and error correction. Surveys treat entanglement, Bell nonlocality, contextuality, and decoherence in isolation or narrow subcommunities. This review advances a unified perspective analysing these phenomena as distinct but interrelated manifestations of nonclassical correlations with an operational structure. We organise bipartite entanglement through separability criteria, Schmidt decomposition, and partial-transpose techniques, and develop tools for nonlocal correlations based on Bell inequalities, Tsirelson’s bound, nonlocal games, and self-testing, emphasising device-independent protocols. We then examine contextuality and magic states as resources for quantum computational advantage beyond entanglement, clarifying their relationship to nonlocality. Finally, we characterise decoherence as environment-induced entanglement selecting classical records, and use this perspective to specify which aspects of the measurement problem it addresses and which require interpretational or dynamical extensions. Integrating these dimensions, the review clarifies how notions of nonclassicality relate, diverge, and underpin quantum technologies.
Nonlocality and contextuality are at the root of conceptual puzzles in quantum mechanics, and are key resources for quantum advantage in information-processing tasks. Bell nonlocality is best understood as the incompatibility between quantum correlations and the classical theory of causality, applied to relativistic causal structure. Contextuality, on the other hand, is on a more controversial foundation. In this work, I provide a common conceptual ground between nonlocality and contextuality as violations of classical causality. First, I show that Bell inequalities can be derived solely from the assumptions of no-signalling and no-fine-tuning of the causal model. This removes two extra assumptions from a recent result from Wood and Spekkens, and remarkably, does not require any assumption related to independence of measurement settings -- unlike all other derivations of Bell inequalities. I then introduce a formalism to represent contextuality scenarios within causal models and show that all classical causal models for violations of a Kochen-Specker inequality require fine-tuning. Thus the quantum violation of classical causality goes beyond the case of space-like separated systems, and manifests already in scenarios involving single systems.
An ontological model of an operational theory is considered to be universally noncontextual if both preparation and measurement noncontextuality assumptions are satisfied in that model. In this report, we first generalize the logical proofs of quantum preparation and measurement contextuality for qubit system for any odd number of preparations and measurements. Based on the logical proof, we derive testable universally non-contextual inequalities violated by quantum theory. We then propose a class of two-party communication games and show that the average success probability of winning such games is solely linked to suitable Bell expression whose local bound is greater than universal non-contextual bound. Thus, for a given state, even if quantum theory does not exhibit non-locality, it may still reveal non-classicality by violating the universal non-contextual bound. Further, we consider a different communication game to demonstrate that for a given choices of observables in quantum theory, even if there is no logical proof of preparation and measurement contextuality exist, the universal quantum contextuality can be revealed through that communication game. Such a game thus test a weaker form of universal non-contextuality with minimal assumption.
Abstract The relations between Bell nonlocality and Kochen–Specker contextuality have been subject of research from many different perspectives in the last decades. Recently, some interesting results on these relations have been explored in the so-called generalized Bell scenarios, that is, scenarios where Bell spatial separation (or agency independence) coexist with (at least one of the) parties’ ability to perform compatible measurements at each round of the experiment. When this party has an n-cycle compatiblity setup, it was first claimed that Bell nonlocality could not be concomitantly observed with contextuality at this party’s local experiment. However, by a more natural reading of the definition of locality, it turns out that both Bell nonlocality and local contextuality can, in fact, be jointly present. In spite of it, in this work we prove that in the simplest of those scenarios there cannot be arbitrary amounts of both of these two resources together. That is, in these cases we show that the violation of any Bell inequality limits the possible violations of any local noncontextuality inequality. We also explore this trade-off relation using quantifiers of nonlocality and contextuality, discussing how such a relation can be understood in terms of a ‘global’ notion of contextuality, and we study possible extensions of this result to other scenarios.