Self-testing constitutes one of the most powerful forms of device certification, enabling a complete and device-independent characterization of a quantum apparatus solely from the observed correlations. In recent work by the authors [23], a general framework was introduced for constructing Bell inequalities that self-test entire families of Clifford generators. In this manuscript, we develop an alternative and complementary self-testing criterion based on symmetric spanning sets. This formulation provides an explicit and constructive route to designing self-testing Bell inequalities in arbitrary dimensions.
Self-testing constitutes one of the most powerful forms of device certification, enabling a complete and device-independent characterization of a quantum apparatus solely from the observed correlations. In recent work by the authors [23], a general framework was introduced for constructing Bell inequalities that self-test entire families of Clifford generators. In this manuscript, we develop an alternative and complementary self-testing criterion based on symmetric spanning sets. This formulation provides an explicit and constructive route to designing self-testing Bell inequalities in arbitrary dimensions.
Abstract Bell inequalities provide a fundamental tool for probing nonlocal correlations, yet their quantum bound, that is, the maximal value attainable by quantum strategies, is rarely accessible analytically. In this work, we introduce a general construction of Bell inequalities for which this bound can be computed exactly. The construction is based on a class of rectangular matrices with pairwise orthogonal rows and normalized columns, which we call row-orthogonal, column-normalized (ROCN) matrices. Our framework generalizes both the Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequality and Gisin’s elegant Bell inequality, yielding Bell expressions maximally violated by arbitrary families of pairwise anticommuting Clifford observables together with the corresponding maximally entangled state. Under suitable assumptions, these inequalities also enable the device-independent certification of Majorana fermions, understood as multiqubit realizations of Clifford algebra generators. Importantly, we identify an additional equivalence that must be incorporated into self-testing, beyond the standard equivalences generated by local isometries, the addition of auxiliary degrees of freedom, and complex conjugation. This equivalence arises from applying partial transposition jointly to the shared state and the measurements, which, whenever it is well-defined, preserves all observed correlations.
Bell inequalities provide a fundamental tool for probing nonlocal correlations, yet their quantum bound, that is, the maximal value attainable through quantum strategies, is rarely accessible analytically. In this work, we introduce a general construction of Bell inequalities for which this bound can be computed exactly. Our framework generalizes both the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt and Gisin's elegant inequalities, yielding Bell expressions maximally violated by any number of pairwise anticommuting Clifford observables together with the corresponding maximally entangled state. Under suitable assumptions, our inequalities also enable the device-independent certification of Majorana fermions, understood as multiqubit realizations of Clifford algebra generators. Importantly, we identify an additional equivalence that must be incorporated into the definition of self-testing beyond invariance under local isometries and transposition. This equivalence arises from partial transposition applied to the shared state and to the measurements, which in specific cases leaves all observed correlations unchanged.
Self-testing is a device-independent technique based on non-local correlations whose aim is to certify the effective uniqueness of the quantum state and measurements needed to produce these correlations. It is known that the maximal violation of some Bell inequalities suffices for this purpose. However, most of the existing self-testing protocols for two devices exploit the well-known Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt Bell inequality or modifications of it, and always with two measurements per party. Here, we generalize the previous results by demonstrating that one can construct self-testing protocols based on the chained Bell inequalities, defined for two devices implementing an arbitrary number of two-output measurements. On the one hand, this proves that the quantum state and measurements leading to the maximal violation of the chained Bell inequality are unique. On the other hand, in the limit of a large number of measurements, our approach allows one to self-test the entire plane of measurements spanned by the Pauli matrices X and Z . Our results also imply that the chained Bell inequalities can be used to certify two bits of perfect randomness.
While quantum networks have been extensively studied as a natural extension of the standard Bell scenario with a richer correlation structure, general constructions of nonlinear Bell inequalities with self-testing properties are still largely lacking. In this work, we present a general method for constructing such inequalities in the simplest network scenario, in which two independent sources distribute bipartite quantum states to three spatially separated observers. These inequalities allow for arbitrary numbers of binary measurements and are maximally violated by maximally entangled states of the corresponding local dimensions together with sets of pairwise anticommuting Clifford observables. Importantly, their maximal quantum values can be determined analytically, which makes them particularly promising for device-independent applications. In particular, we prove that these Bell inequalities can be used to device-independently certify the underlying quantum network, including both the quantum states produced by the sources and the observables measured by all parties. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first self-testing result for quantum networks that relies solely on the maximal violation of a nonlocality witness.
Bell inequality with a self-testing property has played an important role in quantum information processing with both fundamental and practical significance. However, it is generally challenging to find Bell inequalities used for self-testing multipartite states, and actually, there are not many known candidates. In this work we propose a systematic framework to construct Bell inequalities from stabilizers which are maximally violated by general stabilizer states, with two observables for each local party. We show that the constructed Bell inequalities can self-test any stabilizer state if and only if these stabilizers can uniquely determine the state in a device-dependent manner. This bridges the gap between device-independent and device-dependent verification methods. Our framework can provide plenty of Bell inequalities for self-testing N-party stabilizer states. Among them, we give two families of Bell inequalities with different advantages: (1) a family of Bell inequalities with a constant ratio of quantum and classical bounds using 2N correlations, and (2) single pair inequalities improving on all previous robustness self-testing bounds using N+1 correlations, which are both efficient and robust for realizations in multipartite systems.
Device-independent certification schemes have gained a lot of interest lately, not only for their applications in quantum information tasks, but also their implications towards foundations of quantum theory. The strongest form of device-independent certification, known as self-testing, often requires for a Bell inequality to be maximally violated by specific quantum states and measurements. In this work, using the techniques developed recently [S. Sarkar et al., npj Quantum Inf. 7, 151 (2021)], we provide a self-testing scheme for the multipartite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states of arbitrary local dimension that does not rely on self-testing results for qubit states and that exploits the minimal number of two measurements per party. This makes our results interesting as far as practical implementation of device-independent certification methods is concerned. Our self-testing statement relies on maximal violation of a Bell inequality proposed recently [R. Augusiak et al., New J. Phys. 21, 113001 (2019)].