The foundational work by Bell led to an interest in understanding non-local correlations that arise from entangled states shared between distinct, spacelike-separated parties, which formed a foundation for the theory of quantum information processing. We investigate the question of maximal correlations analogous to the maximally entangled states defined in the entanglement theory of multipartite systems. In this work, we define the maximality of nonlocal correlation as being analogous to the absolutely maximally entangled state. To formalize this, we employ the sheaf-theoretic framework for contextuality, which generalizes non-locality. This provides a metric for correlations called contextual fraction (CF), which ranges from $0$ (non-contextual) to $1$ (maximally contextual). Using this, we have defined the absolutely maximal contextual correlations (AMCC), which are maximally contextual and have maximal marginals. The Popescu-Rohrlich (PR) box serves as the bipartite example, and we construct various extensions of such correlations in the tripartite case. An infinite family of various forms of AMCC is constructed using the parity check and the constraint satisfiability problem (CSP) construction. We also demonstrate the existence of maximally contextual correlations, which do not exhibit maximal marginals, and refer to them as non-AMCC. Furthermore, we showed that GHZ correlations in the $(n,2,2)$ setting give rise to AMCCs for the particular choice of measurement settings. The results are further applied to secret sharing and randomness extraction using AMCCs.
The foundational work by Bell led to an interest in understanding non-local correlations that arise from entangled states shared between distinct, spacelike-separated parties, which formed a foundation for the theory of quantum information processing. We investigate the question of maximal correlations analogous to the maximally entangled states defined in the entanglement theory of multipartite systems. In this work, we define the maximality of nonlocal correlation as being analogous to the absolutely maximally entangled state. To formalize this, we employ the sheaf-theoretic framework for contextuality, which generalizes non-locality. This provides a metric for correlations called contextual fraction (CF), which ranges from 0 (non-contextual) to 1 (maximally contextual). Using this, we have defined the absolutely maximal contextual correlations (AMCC), which are maximally contextual and have maximal marginals. The Popescu-Rohrlich (PR) box serves as the bipartite example, and we construct various extensions of such correlations in the tripartite case. An infinite family of various forms of AMCC is constructed using the parity check and the constraint satisfiability problem (CSP) construction. We also demonstrate the existence of maximally contextual correlations, which do not exhibit maximal marginals, and refer to them as non-AMCC. Furthermore, we showed that GHZ correlations in the (n,2,2) setting give rise to AMCCs for the particular choice of measurement settings. The results are further applied to secret sharing and randomness extraction using AMCCs.
The Kochen Specker theorem revealed contextuality as a fundamental nonclassical feature of nature. Nonlocality arises as a special case of contextuality, where entangled states shared by space like separated parties exhibit nonlocal correlations. The notion of maximality in correlations, analogous to maximal entanglement, is less explored in multipartite systems. In our work, we have defined maximal correlations in terms of contextual models, which are analogous to absolutely maximally entangled (AME) states. Employing the sheaf theoretic framework, we introduce maximal contextual correlations associated with the corresponding maximal contextual model. The formalism introduces the contextual fraction CF as a measure of contextuality, taking values from 0 (noncontextual) to 1 (fully contextual). This enables the formulation of a new class of correlations termed absolutely maximal contextual correlations (AMCC), which are both maximally contextual and maximal marginals. In the bipartite setting, the canonical example is the Popescu Rohrlich (PR) box, while in the tripartite case, it includes Greenberger Horne Zeilinger (GHZ) correlations and three way nonlocal correlations. In this work, we extend these findings to four party correlations. Notably, no AME state exists for four qubits, which introduces a subtle difference between AMCC and AME. The construction follows the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) and parity check methods. In particular, the explicit realization of a non AMCC correlation that is maximally contextual yet not maximal marginal is obtained within the CSP framework.
The key feature in correlations established by multi-party quantum entangled states is nonlocality. A quantity to measure the average nonlocality, distinguishing it from shared randomness and in a direct relation with no-signaling stochastic processes (which provide an operational interpretation of quantum correlations, without involving information transmission between the parties as to sustain causality), is proposed and resolved exhaustively for the quantum correlations established by a Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt setup (or CHSH box). The amount of nonlocality that is available in a CHSH box is measured by its proximity to the nearest Popescu-Rohrlich set of causal stochastic processes (aka a PR box) in the no-signaling polytope, related by polyhedral duality to Bell's correlation function. The proposed amount of average nonlocality is an entanglement monotone with a simple relation to concurrence. We provide the optimal setup vectors of a maximally nonlocal CHSH box for any entangled pair. The strongest nonlocality is the fraction [Formula: see text] of a PR box, attained by maximally entangled qubit pairs. The most economical causal stochastic process reproducing any maximally nonlocal CHSH box is developed. Data produced by a computer implementation of the simulator agrees with the quantum mechanical formulas.
In the past century, experimental discoveries have witnessed phenomena in Nature which challenge our everyday classical intuition. In order to explain these facts, quantum theory was developed, which so far has been able to reproduce the observed results. However, I believe that our understanding of quantum mechanics can be significantly improved by the search for an operational meaning behind its mathematical formulation, which would help to identify the limitations and possibilities of the theory for information processing. An intriguing property of quantum theory is its intrinsic randomness. Indeed, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in 1935 questioned the completeness of quantum theory. They argued the possibility of the existence of a complete theory where variables to which we have not access determine the behaviour of physical systems, and the randomness observed in quantum mechanics is then due to our ignorance of these variables. These hidden variables theories, however, were proved not to be enough for explaining the predictions of quantum theory, as shown in the no-go theorems by Bell on quantum-nonlocality and by Kochen and Specker on quantum-contextuality. In the past decades, many experiments have corroborated the nonlocal and contextual character of Nature. However, no intuition behind these phenomena has been found, in particular about what limits their strength. In fact, special relativity alone would allow for phenomena which are more nonlocal than what quantum theory allows. Hence, much effort has been devoted to find the physical properties of quantum theory that restricts these phenomena. In this thesis, we study the constraints that arise on nonlocal and contextual phenomena when a certain exclusiveness structure compatible with quantum theory is imposed in the space of events. Here, an event denotes the situation where an outcome is obtained given that a measurement is performed on the physical system. Regarding nonlocality, we introduce a notion of orthogonality that states that events involving different outcomes of the same local measurement are exclusive, and construct constraints that the correlations among observers should satisfy. We denote this by Local Orthogonality principle (LO), which is the first intrinsically multipartite principle for bounding quantum correlations. We prove that LO identifies the supra-quantum character of some bipartite and multipartite correlations, and gets close to the quantum boundary. When studying contextuality, the same abstract event may correspond to outcomes of different measurements, which introduces a non-trivial structure in the space of events. For its study, we develop a general formalism for contextuality scenarios in the spirit of the recent approach by Cabello, Severini and Winter. In our framework, nonlocality arises as a particular case of contextuality, which allows us to study a generalization of LO. Both in nonlocality and contextuality, we find close connections to problems in combinatorics and hence use graph-theoretical tools for studying correlations. Finally, this thesis also studies the detection of nonlocal correlations. Most results on quantum nonlocality focus on few particles' experiments, while less is known about the detection of quantum nonlocality in many-body systems. Standard many-body observables involve correlations among few particles, while there is still no multipartite Bell inequality to test nonlocality merely from these data. In this thesis, we provide the first proposal for nonlocality detection in many-body systems using two-body correlations. We construct families of Bell inequalities from two-body correlators, which can detect nonlocality for systems with large number of constituents. In addition, we prove violations by systems which are relevant in nuclear and atomic physics, and show how to test these inequalities by measuring global spin components, hence opening the problem to experimental realizations.
While all bipartite pure entangled states are known to generate correlations violating a Bell inequality, and are therefore nonlocal, the quantitative relation between pure state entanglement and nonlocality is poorly understood. In fact, some Bell inequalities are maximally violated by non-maximally entangled states and this phenomenon is also observed for other operational measures of nonlocality. In this work, we study a recently proposed measure of nonlocality defined as the probability that a pure state displays nonlocal correlations when subjected to random measurements. We first prove that this measure satisfies some natural properties for an operational measure of nonlocality. Then, we show that for pure states of two qubits the measure is monotonic with entanglement for all correlation two-outcome Bell inequalities: for all these inequalities, the more the state is entangled, the larger the probability to violate them when random measurements are performed. Finally, we extend our results to the multipartite setting.
Despite the success of quantum mechanics in predicting the outcomes of experiments in many branches of physics, the foundations of the theory have remained subject of research and dispute. At the basis of this struggle with the theory lie the phenomena of nonlocality and entanglement. Since it was first predicted by Bell in 1964, nonlocality was not only verified in numerous experiments, but also identified as a useful resource for quantum information processing. Thus, the study of nonlocality is important both from a fundamental point of view and with respect to new applications in quantum information theory, such as secure cryptography and randomness generation. The identification of entanglement as a resource for quantum information led to a strong theoretical effort devoted to its characterisation and detection. Many of the resulting mathematical tools find application in several domains of physics. Although the only known way to create nonlocal correlations is to measure entangled quantum systems, it has been shown that entanglement and nonlocality constitute two inequivalent properties. Therefore, in the light of the success of entanglement theory, it is of interest to also devise a resource theory of nonlocality. The task of this thesis is to develop such a theoretical framework for the characterisation of nonlocality as a resource. To gain a better understanding of nonlocal correlations it will be necessary to investigate correlation scenarios that go beyond the situation originally considered by Bell. In doing so, this thesis provides new description of nonlocality that also have implications for the characterisation of quantum correlations and the detection of new forms of nonlocality. The first question we address is how nonlocality can consistently be defined in a scenario of arbitrarily many parties that may collaborate among each other. To this end we recognise which are the allowed physical operations in this situation and then define nonlocality as the resource that cannot be created by these operations. Our approach shows that the conventional definition of multipartite nonlocality, adopted by the community so far, is inconsistent with this operational definition; we further propose and analyse new models that do not suffer from these inconsistencies. Furthermore, we show that our findings have implications for the characterisation of quantum correlations. A recent approach to describe the set of quantum correlation consists in using principles inspired from information theory. By using a special instance of the models we defined earlier we show a fundamental limitation of this approach: no bipartite information principle is sufficient to single out the set of quantum correlations from the set of nonsignalling correlations. We then developed a description of nonlocality in an even more generalised scenario of several parties. Motivated by a result of Popescu we study scenarios where the parties are allowed to perform not only a single but sequences of measurements on their systems. Characterising nonlocality also in this scenario in operational terms and defining local models compatible with this definition, we show that a new form of nonlocality can be detected Lastly, we examine the problem of detecting the presence of nonlocality in a multipartite scenario when one is given only partial access to the global system. We find that one can verify that the total system must display nonlocality, even though the accessible subsystems only exhibit local correlations.
It is a well-established fact that some quantum correlations can be nonlocal, meaning that they cannot be described by a local hidden variable model. Certain quantum correlations have a form of nonlocality so strong that they cannot be reproduced even by models having an arbitrarily small local hidden variable component. These correlations are called fully nonlocal and lead to Bell inequalities in which the maximum quantum value saturates the non-signaling bound. A well-known example of this effect, which is also referred to as quantum pseudo-telepathy or all-versus-nothing proofs of nonlocality, is the quantum distribution fulfilling the Peres-Mermin square, in which the underlying state is a 4×4 dimensional maximally entangled state. Other examples of full nonlocality are known but, so far, all of them are for maximally entangled states and it is an open question whether maximal entanglement is necessary for full nonlocality. In this work, we first establish a link between full nonlocality and the concept of antidistinguishability of quantum states. We use this connection to show that in every bipartite d×d Hilbert space, with d≥3, there are non-maximally entangled states that are fully nonlocal. In fact, we derive simple sufficient conditions for full nonlocality that are only based on the smallest and largest Schmidt coefficients. We also show that in every dimension there exist pure entangled states that do not exhibit full nonlocality. Finally, we show that all pure entangled states can be activated to show full nonlocality in the many-copy scenario.