Bell nonlocality is a fundamental phenomenon of quantum physics as well as an essential resource for various tasks in quantum information processing. It is known that for the observation of nonlocality the measurements on a quantum system have to be incompatible, but the question of which incompatible measurements are useful, remained open. Here we prove that any set of incompatible measurements on qubits leads to a violation of a suitable Bell inequality in a multiparticle scenario, where all parties perform the same set of measurements. Since there exists incompatible measurements on qubits which do not lead to Bell nonlocality for two particles, our results demonstrate a fundamental difference between two-particle and multiparticle nonlocality, pointing at the superactivation of measurement incompatibility as a resource. In addition, our results imply that measurement incompatibility for qubits can always be certified in a device-independent manner.
Bell nonlocality is a fundamental phenomenon of quantum physics as well as an essential resource for various tasks in quantum information processing. It is known that for the observation of nonlocality the measurements on a quantum system have to be incompatible, but the question of which incompatible measurements are useful, remained open. Here we prove that any set of incompatible measurements on qubits leads to a violation of a suitable Bell inequality in a multiparticle scenario, where all parties perform the same set of measurements. Since there exists incompatible measurements on qubits which do not lead to Bell nonlocality for two particles, our results demonstrate a fundamental difference between two-particle and multiparticle nonlocality, pointing at the superactivation of measurement incompatibility as a resource. In addition, our results imply that measurement incompatibility for qubits can always be certified in a device-independent manner.
Measurement incompatibility and bipartite quantum steering are known to display a strong connection: a set of measurements is incompatible if and only if it can lead to bipartite steering. Despite such a close link between these concepts in bipartite scenarios, little is known in the multipartite setting, where notions of genuine multipartite correlations play major roles. In this work we prove that, as in the bipartite case, incompatibility is also necessary and sufficient for genuine multipartite steering in any multipartite scenario with a single uncharacterised party. Interestingly, genuine multipartite steering can be extracted from any set of incompatible measurements using states which are not SLOCC equivalent, such as GHZ and W states. In contrast, we prove that this result does not hold in scenarios with more than one uncharacterised party, by presenting a set of incompatible measurements that can never lead to genuine multipartite steering in these cases. In order to obtain our main results, we introduce methods tailored for multipartite correlations, paving the way to understanding the role of measurement incompatibility beyond bipartite scenarios.
We study prepare-and-measure experiments where the sender (Alice) receives trusted quantum inputs but has an untrusted state-preparation device and the receiver (Bob) has a fully untrusted measurement device. A distributed-sampling task naturally arises in this scenario, where the goal is for Alice and Bob to reproduce the statistics of his measurements on her quantum inputs using a fixed communication channel. Their performance of this task can certify quantum communication (QC), and this is formalized by measurement-device-independent QC witnesses. Furthermore, we prove that QC can provide an advantage (over classical communication) for distributed sampling if and only if Bob's measurements are incompatible. This gives an operational interpretation to measurement incompatibility and motivates a generalized notion of it related to a subset of quantum states. Our findings have both fundamental and applied implications.
Measurement compatibility asks whether a family of quantum measurements can be simulated by one parent measurement followed by classical post-processing. We extend this measurement compatibility to the notion of \emph{
d-compatibility} for measurements, channels, and instruments whose parent passes a
d-dimensional quantum system and unlimited classical information to the post-processing. We formulate
d-compatibility as a common linear factorization of operator spaces and operator systems and show that
d-compatible families form a closed set, even with infinitely many settings and a separable infinite-dimensional input. To certify
d-incompatibility, we define the compatibility functional as the smallest product of completely bounded norms over common factorizations through a
d-dimensional register. Using factorization theory of operator spaces, we show that measure-and-prepare channels defined in terms of mutually unbiased bases and pinching channels defined in terms of Heisenberg-Weyl operators are
d-incompatible in certain regimes of
d. We also link
d-compatibility of multi-instruments to the preparability of Choi assemblages using channel-state duality, and use this connection to show that for bipartite states the (in)compatibility of instruments can be used to certify Schmidt numbers and the implementability of the instrument using one-way LOCC protocols. Finally, our compatibility functional also bounds the generalized robustness of compatibility, which we interpret through a memory-bounded nontransient preparation game.
We discuss the connection between the incompatibility of quantum measurements, as captured by the notion of joint measurability, and the violation of Bell inequalities. Specifically, we explicitly present a given set of non-jointly-measurable positive-operator-value measures (POVMs)
MA with the following property. Considering a bipartite Bell test where Alice uses
MA, then for any possible shared entangled state $\ensuremath{\rho}$ and any set of (possibly infinitely many) POVMs
NB performed by Bob, the resulting statistics admits a local model and can thus never violate any Bell inequality. This shows that quantum measurement incompatibility does not imply Bell nonlocality in general.