Certifying maximal quantum randomness without assumptions about system dimension remains a pivotal challenge for secure communication and foundational studies. Here, we introduce a generalized framework to directly certify maximal randomness from observed probability distributions across systems with arbitrary user numbers, without relying on the Bell-inequality violations. By analyzing probability distributions directly, we identify a class of quantum states and projective measurements that achieve maximal randomness in bipartite and tripartite scenarios, ensuring practical feasibility. Further analysis reveals a counterintuitive trade-off governing measurement incompatibility among users: sufficient incompatibility for one user permits arbitrarily small incompatibility for others, defying conventional symmetry assumptions in the Bell test. This asymmetry provides a pathway to optimize device-independent protocols by strategically distributing quantum resources. Our results establish a versatile and experimentally accessible route to scalable randomness certification, with implications for quantum cryptography and the physics of nonlocal correlations.
Certifying maximal quantum randomness without assumptions about system dimension remains a pivotal challenge for secure communication and foundational studies. Here, we introduce a generalized framework to directly certify maximal randomness from observed probability distributions across systems with arbitrary user numbers, without relying on the Bell-inequality violations. By analyzing probability distributions directly, we identify a class of quantum states and projective measurements that achieve maximal randomness in bipartite and tripartite scenarios, ensuring practical feasibility. Further analysis reveals a counterintuitive trade-off governing measurement incompatibility among users: sufficient incompatibility for one user permits arbitrarily small incompatibility for others, defying conventional symmetry assumptions in the Bell test. This asymmetry provides a pathway to optimize device-independent protocols by strategically distributing quantum resources. Our results establish a versatile and experimentally accessible route to scalable randomness certification, with implications for quantum cryptography and the physics of nonlocal correlations.
Measurement incompatibility enables quantum advantages in communication and state discrimination. It is also necessary for Bell nonlocality, which is used in device-independent protocols for quantum key distribution and private randomness generation. Classical communication can influence the receiver's outcome and must therefore be accounted for when certifying measurement incompatibility. We introduce union maximal leakage, which quantifies the information needed for a common classical explanation of all observed probabilities and is computed from them by a linear program. If a message of at most k bits precedes the receiver's independent measurement choice, compatible measurements for each message give union maximal leakage at most k. This bound holds with any input-independent nonsignalling shared resource. In quantum theory, a violation also implies that the initially shared state is entangled. Conversely, union maximal leakage determines the minimum classical communication needed to reproduce the observations with compatible measurements and arbitrary nonsignalling assistance. For a fixed shared quantum state and receiver measurements, a violation is possible exactly when, for some message value, the receiver's measurements are Bell-nonlocal against two-outcome sender measurements on that state. For binary receiver outcomes, we show that a violation also certifies randomness private from the sender, even when the receiver's measurement depends on the sender's message and the sender retains quantum side information. We quantify this privacy through an explicit conditional entropy bound and establish composably secure randomness extraction in sequential protocols with device memory.
Quantum randomness can be certified from probabilistic behavior demonstrating Bell nonlocality or Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering, leveraging outcomes from uncharacterized devices. However, in standard spot-checking protocols, such nonlocal correlations are not always sufficient for this task, necessitating the identification of required minimum quantum resources. In this Letter, we focus on the bipartite scenario and provide the necessary and sufficient condition for nonzero certified randomness under any arbitrary but fixed input, formulated in terms of measurement incompatibility. Further, we develop practical approaches to detect it. Firstly, we show that the steering-based randomness can be certified if and only if the correlations arise from a measurement compatibility structure that is not isomorphic to a hypergraph containing a star subgraph. In such a structure, the central measurement is individually compatible with the measurements at branch sites, ruling out the possibility of certified randomness in the central measurement outcomes. Subsequently, we generalize this result to the Bell scenario, proving that the violation of any chained Bell inequality involving a finite number of inputs and outputs excludes such a compatibility structure, thereby validating all chained inequalities as credible witnesses for randomness certification. Our results point out the role of an incompatibility structure in generating random numbers, offering a way to identify minimum quantum resources for the task.
We investigate device-independent certification of global randomness based on Bell inequality violations in bipartite scenarios with three outcomes per party. Our goal is to determine whether multi-outcome measurements allow one to surpass the amount of randomness achievable with binary outputs in realistic scenarios. We begin by analyzing several known Bell expressions and evaluating their robustness against noise for randomness certification. We then introduce a systematic method for generating new Bell expressions within structured families and perform a large-scale numerical study. We find that a substantial number of inequalities certify significant amounts of min-entropy. In particular, we identify simple inequalities that achieve near-maximal global randomness while involving a reduced number of measurement settings, thus improving the balance between certified randomness and number of inputs. Moreover, the vast majority of nontrivial certificates exhibit robustness against realistic noise, maintaining positive certified randomness away from the ideal regime. These results demonstrate that strong device-independent randomness expansion in multi-outcome scenarios is not restricted to carefully engineered inequalities, but arises generically within suitably constructed families of Bell expressions.
Bell nonlocality provides the foundation for device-independent (DI) certification of quantum devices. We introduce a Bell inequality capable of identifying genuine multipartite nonlocality (GMNL) in an arbitrary m-partite scenario with an arbitrary odd number of measurements per party. Since the multi-setting nature of this inequality precludes the use of Jordan's Lemma, we construct an analytical sum-of-squares (SOS) decomposition to obtain the optimal quantum violation without assuming any bound on the Hilbert space dimension. This, in turn, enables self-testing of the shared entangled state and the corresponding measurement observables, up to local isometries, whose existence we confirm using a swap-based certification scheme. In addition, we show that our framework enables the extraction of maximal global DI randomness (m bits) at the optimal quantum violation, thereby exceeding previous limitations in the GMNL regime. Finally, we demonstrate that the architecture of our inequality yields improved robustness to noise as the number of measurement settings grows, ensuring experimental feasibility.
We investigate the prepare-and-broadcast scenario, a multipartite extension of dimension-constrained prepare-and-measure experiments in which a quantum system is distributed to multiple receivers. We derive fundamental trade-offs between prepare-and-measure witnesses, Bell nonlocality, and quantum random access code performance. We further develop a semi-device-independent randomness certification framework based on prepare-and-broadcast witnesses, showing that the maximal quantum violation certifies two bits of joint randomness, exceeding the limit achievable from the CHSH inequality while remaining robust to noise. Finally, we show that the prepare-and-broadcast scenario naturally accommodates stronger adversarial models in which the eavesdropper retains a quantum system correlated with the measurement device, providing a natural framework for semi-device-independent randomness certification against quantum side information.
Nonlocal tests on multi-partite quantum correlations form the basis of protocols that certify randomness in a device-independent (DI) way. Such correlations admit a rich structure, making the task of choosing an appropriate test difficult. For example, extremal Bell inequalities are tight witnesses of nonlocality, but achieving their maximum violation places constraints on the underlying quantum system, which can reduce the rate of randomness generation. As a result there is often a trade-off between maximum randomness and the amount of violation of a given Bell inequality. Here, we explore this trade-off for more than two parties. More precisely, we study the maximum amount of randomness that can be certified by correlations with a particular violation of the Mermin-Ardehali-Belinskii-Klyshko (MABK) inequality. For any even number of parties, we find that maximum randomness cannot occur beyond a threshold quantum violation, which increases with the number of parties, and we give a conjectured form of the maximum randomness in terms of the MABK value. We also show that maximum randomness can be obtained for any MABK violation for odd numbers of parties. To obtain our results, we derive new families of Bell inequalities certifying maximum randomness from a technique for randomness certification, which we call "expanding Bell inequalities''. Our technique allows a bipartite Bell expression to be used as a seed, and transformed into a multi-partite Bell inequality tailored for randomness certification, showing how intuition learned in the bipartite case can find use in more complex scenarios.