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arXiv:2604.09772

Leggett-Garg Inequality Violations Bound Quantum Fisher Information

Nick Abboud, Yuntao Guan, Barry Bradlyn, Jorge Noronha

quant-phcond-mat.stat-mechhep-thSubmitted Apr 10, 2026• Announced Apr 14, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We prove that a violation of a Leggett-Garg inequality for bounded observables in stationary pure states and thermal states yields a rigorous lower bound on the quantum Fisher information. This turns a qualitative foundations test of realism in quantum systems into a quantitative witness of useful quantum sensitivity and, in the collective setting, into a lower bound on multipartite entanglement depth in many-body systems. We further demonstrate that Leggett-Garg violations are constrained by the same spectral moments, susceptibilities, and $f$-sum-rule bounds that organize many-body response. Our results show that temporal correlations of a single collective observable can serve as an experimentally accessible witness of many-body quantum coherence, without requiring full state reconstruction.

Comments
13 pages, 1 figure. Includes supplemental material

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We prove that a violation of a Leggett-Garg inequality for bounded observables in stationary pure states and thermal states yields a rigorous lower bound on the quantum Fisher information. This turns a qualitative foundations test of realism in quantum systems into a quantitative witness of useful quantum sensitivity and, in the collective setting, into a lower bound on multipartite entanglement depth in many-body systems. We further demonstrate that Leggett-Garg violations are constrained by the same spectral moments, susceptibilities, and fff-sum-rule bounds that organize many-body response. Our results show that temporal correlations of a single collective observable can serve as an experimentally accessible witness of many-body quantum coherence, without requiring full state reconstruction.
We propose an experimentally accessible scheme to determine the lower bounds on the quantum Fisher information (QFI), which ascertains multipartite entanglement or usefulness for quantum metrology. The scheme is based on comparing the measurement statistics of a state before and after a small unitary rotation. We argue that, in general, the limited resolution of collective observables prevents the detection of large QFI. This can be overcome by performing an additional operation prior to the measurement. We illustrate the power of this protocol for present-day spin-squeezing experiments, where the same operation used for the preparation of the initial spin-squeezed state improves also the measurement precision and hence the lower bound on the QFI by 2 orders of magnitude. We also establish a connection to the Leggett-Garg inequalities. We show how to simulate a variant of the inequalities with our protocol and demonstrate that large QFI is necessary for their violation with coarse-grained detectors.
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Macrorealistic description governing the classical realm is known to get uprooted in the quantum domain. The Leggett-Garg inequality [A. J. Leggett and A. Garg, Phys. Rev. Lett. 54, 857 (1985)] proposes to probe the macrorealistic limit emerging from the quantum scenario. It places a bound on the linear combinations of temporal correlations of observables measured sequentially at different time intervals. Violation of the Leggett-Garg inequality, up to the so-called temporal Tsirelson bound (TTB), has been realized in the quantum domain. It is important to understand whether quantum theory permits larger violation beyond the TTB and up to the algebraic maximum value of the Leggett-Garg inequality. To this end, it has been shown [C. Budroni and C. Emary, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 050401 (2014)] that a three-term Leggett-Garg inequality can be violated beyond the TTB 3/23/23/2 in the time evolution of N>2N>2N>2 level quantum systems by choosing suitable measurement schemes and state-update rules. Furthermore, it is revealed that the algebraic maximum value 3 can be realized in the limit $N\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$. Their measurement scheme rules out violation of the Leggett-Garg inequality beyond the TTB by a qubit. Being genuinely quantum in nature, we ask whether such enhanced violation of the Leggett-Garg inequality could be witnessed in a qubit itself. Here, we show that a qubit undergoing time evolution generated by a non-Hermitian PT\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}PT-symmetric Hamiltonian indeed violates the three-term Leggett-Garg inequality beyond the TTB and up to its algebraic maximum value 3.
In this paper, we attempt to establish the relationship between quantum coherence and the violation of the Leggett-Garg inequality. In particular, employing the Lindblad equation, we obtain the pseudo-density matrix for a damping system to study the effect of environment interaction on the violation of this inequality in a two-state quantum system. It is shown that the violation of the Leggett-Garg inequality can be observed as long as temporal evolution does not induce decoherence. This statement is independent of the initial state of the system. Furthermore, similar to the Horodecki criterion for the CHSH inequality (R. Horodecki et al. Phys. Lett. {\bf A200}, 340), we study necessary and sufficient conditions for violating the Leggett-Garg inequality. Hereby, under the circumstance that the inequality violation occurs, an upper bound for the time interval between consecutive measurements with respect to the time scale of interaction with the environment (the relaxation time) is obtained.
Leggett-Garg inequalities are tests of macroscopic realism that can be violated by quantum mechanics. In this letter, we realise photonic Leggett-Garg tests on a three-level system and implement measurements that admit three distinct measurement outcomes, rather than the usual two. In this way we obtain violations of three- and four-time Leggett-Garg inequalities that are significantly in excess of those obtainable in standard Leggett-Garg tests. We also report violations the quantum-witness equality up to the maximum permitted for a three-outcome measurement. Our results highlight differences between spatial and temporal correlations in quantum mechanics.