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arXiv:2508.20185 · Physical Review Letters

Any Unitary Gate Can Be Certified Device-Independently in a Quantum Network

Shubhayan Sarkar

Published Jun 11, 2026• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Device-independent (DI) certification allows the verification of quantum systems based solely on observed statistics, without assumptions about their internal structure. While self-testing, the strongest DI certification, of a wide range of quantum states and measurements is done, the self-testing of quantum operations remains underdeveloped. Here, we show in a proof-of-principle way that any quantum unitary can be self-tested within the DI paradigm. For our purpose, we utilize the framework of quantum networks with multiple independent sources. Our Letter provides a fundamental step toward certifying quantum interactions directly from data, without detailed modelling assumptions. Moreover, the result also serves as a crucial ingredient for quantum computation, where verifying that quantum gates perform as intended is essential for building secure and reliable quantum processors.

DOI
10.1103/m1tx-9mx1

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Device-independent (DI) certification allows the verification of quantum systems based solely on observed statistics, without assumptions about their internal structure. While self-testing, the strongest DI certification, of a wide range of quantum states and measurements is done, the self-testing of quantum operations remains underdeveloped. Here, we show in a proof-of-principle way that any quantum unitary can be self-tested within the DI paradigm. For our purpose, we utilize the framework of quantum networks with multiple independent sources. Our Letter provides a fundamental step toward certifying quantum interactions directly from data, without detailed modelling assumptions. Moreover, the result also serves as a crucial ingredient for quantum computation, where verifying that quantum gates perform as intended is essential for building secure and reliable quantum processors.
We present a method to certify the entanglement of all entangled quantum states in a device-independent way. This is achieved by placing the state in a quantum network and constructing a correlation inequality based on an entanglement witness for the state. Our method is device independent, in the sense that entanglement can be certified from the observed statistics alone, under minimal assumptions on the underlying physics. Conceptually, our results borrow ideas from the field of self-testing to bring the recently introduced measurement-device-independent entanglement witnesses into the fully device-independent regime.
Device-independent characterization, also known as self-testing, provides a certification of devices from the result of a Bell test that is suitable for a wide range of applications. We here show that self-testing can be used in an elementary link of a quantum network to certify the successful distribution of a Bell state over 398 meters. Being based on a Bell test free of detection and locality loopholes, our certification is fully device-independent, that is, it does not rely on a knowledge of how the devices work. This guarantees that our link can be integrated in a quantum network for performing long-distance quantum communications with security guarantees that are independent of the details of the actual implementation.
Self-testing is a method to certify devices from the result of a Bell test. Although examples of noise tolerant self-testing are known, it is not clear how to deal efficiently with a finite number of experimental trials to certify the average quality of a device without assuming that it behaves identically at each run. As a result, existing self-testing results with finite statistics have been limited to guarantee the proper working of a device in just one of all experimental trials, thereby limiting their practical applicability. We here derive a method to certify through self-testing that a device produces states on average close to a Bell state without assumption on the actual state at each run. Thus the method is free of the I.I.D. (independent and identically distributed) assumption. Applying this new analysis on the data from a recent loophole-free Bell experiment, we demonstrate the successful distribution of Bell states over 398 meters with an average fidelity of ≥ 55.50% at a confidence level of 99%. Being based on a Bell test free of detection and locality loopholes, our certification is evidently device-independent, that is, it does not rely on trust in the devices or knowledge of how the devices work. This guarantees that our link can be integrated in a quantum network for performing long-distance quantum communications with security guarantees that are independent of the details of the actual implementation.
Certifying a quantum state in a device-independent (DI) manner, in which no trust is placed on the internal workings of any physical components, is a fundamental task bearing various applications in quantum information theory. The composability of a state-certification protocol is key to its integration as a subroutine within information-theoretic protocols. In this work, we present a composable certification of quantum states in a DI manner under the assumption that a source prepares a finite sequence of independent quantum states that are not necessarily identical. We show that the security relies on the DI analog of the fidelity, called the . We develop methods to compute this quantity under local operations and classical communication in certain Bell scenarios that self-test the singlet state, which may also be of independent interest. Finally, we demonstrate our framework by certifying the singlet state in a composable and DI manner using the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality.
Authentication of quantum sources is a crucial task in building reliable and efficient protocols for quantum-information processing.Steady progress vis-à-vis verification of quantum devices in the scenario with fully characterized measurement devices has been observed in recent years.When it comes to the scenario with uncharacterized measurements, the so-called black-box scenario, practical verification methods are still rather scarce.Development of self-testing methods is an important step forward, but these results so far have been used for reliable verification only by considering the asymptotic behavior of large, identically and independently distributed (IID) samples of a quantum resource.Such strong assumptions deprive the verification procedure of its truly device-independent character.In this paper, we develop a systematic approach to device-independent verification of quantum states free of IID assumptions in the finite copy regime.Remarkably, we show that device-independent verification can be performed with optimal sample efficiency.Finally, for the case of independent copies, we develop a device-independent protocol for quantum state certification: a protocol in which a fragment of the resource copies is measured to warrant the rest of the copies to be close to some target state.
Standard quantum verification and certification protocols often assume that experimental sources emit independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) states. In realistic scenarios, however, temporal drift, memory effects, feedback, and correlated noise can violate this assumption, causing standard analyses to underestimate uncertainty and overestimate device performance. Here, we introduce a general framework for quantum verification and certification in which the state produced in each round may depend arbitrarily on the preceding experimental history. Our method provides rigorous confidence intervals for observable expectation values averaged over the experimental trajectory. The framework covers both full verification, in which every state is measured, and spot-checking certification, in which a randomly selected subset is tested to certify the average observable value of the complementary, remaining systems. We apply the framework to importance-sampled Pauli measurements for direct fidelity estimation, energy estimation, and entanglement witnessing, and to classical shadows, allowing multiple observables to be certified simultaneously from the same test data. We illustrate the framework numerically and demonstrate it experimentally through Bell-state certification on a quantum processor.