We present a trade-off between the amount of observed measurement incompatibility and the capabilities of a classical Eavesdropper in a prepare-and-measure scenario. The result is based on a qualitative connection between measurement incompatibility and randomness generation together with the utilization of incompatibility witnesses as randomness certificates. This allows one to use a geometric measure of incompatibility, the generalised robustness, to bound Eve's strategies through a semi-definite program, while providing an explicit protocol for generating randomness from any set of incompatible measurements. By translating the result to quantum steering, we find a tight connection between steerability and randomness generation in a setting using any finite number of measurement inputs. We further show how our techniques can be generalised to scenarios where Eve has a quantum memory by using a dimensional generalisation of joint measurability.
We present a trade-off between the amount of observed measurement incompatibility and the capabilities of a classical Eavesdropper in a prepare-and-measure scenario. The result is based on a qualitative connection between measurement incompatibility and randomness generation together with the utilization of incompatibility witnesses as randomness certificates. This allows one to use a geometric measure of incompatibility, the generalised robustness, to bound Eve's strategies through a semi-definite program, while providing an explicit protocol for generating randomness from any set of incompatible measurements. By translating the result to quantum steering, we find a tight connection between steerability and randomness generation in a setting using any finite number of measurement inputs. We further show how our techniques can be generalised to scenarios where Eve has a quantum memory by using a dimensional generalisation of joint measurability.
Certifying that quantum randomness generated by untrusted devices is unpredictable to an attacker (say, Eve) is crucial for device-independent security. Bipartite protocols where only one of the parties is trusted are termed one-sided device-independent (1SDI) or steering-based protocols, where the untrusted party (say, Alice) performs measurements on her part of a bipartite entangled state to steer the subsystem of the trusted party (say, Bob) into different ensembles (collectively, an assemblage) of quantum states. Recent work has shown that an assemblage has certified randomness if and only if its realization requires a set of measurements that are star-incompatible, i.e., the measurement setting of interest for the guessing probability of Eve is incompatible with at least one of the remaining measurement settings of Alice. However, can one always extract randomness from star-incompatible measurements? And if so, how much randomness can one extract from them? Here we demonstrate that one can extract steering-based randomness from any set of star-incompatible measurements, thereby establishing an equivalence between star-incompatibility and steering-based randomness. We then provide a lower bound on the minimum guessing probability for a given set of measurements that is computable via semidefinite programming. This bound is tight when the Hilbert space dimension of Bob's system is at least that of Alice's. Finally, to provide a quantitative handle on star-incompatibility and the randomness extractable from it, we introduce a weight-based measure of star-incompatibility and lower bound the amount of star-incompatibility required to certify a given amount of randomness.
Measurement incompatibility stipulates the existence of quantum measurements that cannot be carried out simultaneously on single systems. We show that the set of input-output probabilities obtained from d-dimensional classical systems assisted with shared randomness is the same as the set obtained from d-dimensional quantum strategies restricted to compatible measurements with shared randomness in any communication scenario. Thus, measurement incompatibility is necessary for quantum advantage in communication, and any quantum advantage (with or without shared randomness) in communication acts as a witness to the incompatibility of the measurements at the receiver's end in a semi-device-independent way. We introduce a class of communication tasks---a general version of random access codes---to witness incompatibility of an arbitrary number of quantum measurements with arbitrary outcomes acting on d-dimensional systems and provide generic upper bounds on the success metric of these tasks for compatible measurements. We identify all sets of three incompatible rank-one projective qubit measurements that random access codes can witness. Finally, we present the generic relationship between different sets of probability distributions---classical, quantum with or without shared randomness, and quantum restricted to compatible measurements with or without shared randomness---produced in communication scenarios.
Quantum measurements can be incompatible, i.e., they can fail to be jointly measurable. Recently, a weaker notion of joint-measurability, called partial joint-measurability, was proposed by Masini et al. in [Quantum 8, 1574 (2024)]. In this work, we further generalize this notion to the setting where only a subset of the outcomes of each measurement is required to be jointly determined by classical variables. We provide two mathematical formulations of partial joint-measurability and show that, like full joint-measurability, it can be decided by solving a single semidefinite program. We prove that in the case of an untrusted measurement device, an adversary Eve, limited to classical side information, can perfectly guess the outcomes of the measurement device if and only if the set of measurements is partially jointly measurable. We derive analytical thresholds on the detection efficiency below which generic measurements become partially jointly measurable. Such bounds directly yield limits on the robustness of device-independent and semi-device-independent quantum cryptographic protocols against detection inefficiency. In particular, our results highlight the importance of a careful treatment of postselection in security analyses.
The certification of Bell nonlocality or quantum steering implies the use of incompatible measurements. Here we make this connection quantitative. We show how to strengthen robustness-based steering and nonlocality quantifiers in order that they give strong lower bounds to previously proposed incompatibility quantifiers. Our results can be seen from two perspectives. On the one hand, they can be used to estimate how much steering or nonlocality can be demonstrated with a given set of measurements. On the other hand, they give one-sided device-independent and device-independent ways of estimating measurement incompatibility.
Measurement incompatibility underpins randomness generation in nonlocal phenomena. However, at its root, a more fundamental quantum feature is noncommuting (or coherent) measurements. This raises a central question: How can we operationally characterize the quantum advantage of coherent measurements within nonlocal correlations? We answer this by demonstrating that coherent measurements can leverage semi-device-independent (SDI) steering, enabling local randomness generation from any set of coherent measurements. Specifically, we establish that a measurement assemblage can be used to demonstrate SDI steering if and only if it is coherent, providing a complete operational characterization. To provide an application of this operational characterization, we formulate a nonconvex resource theory for SDI steering and propose an operational monotone for the two-setting scenario by mapping noncommuting measurements to SDI steering. Our framework enables a practical quantum random number generator based on SDI steering that eliminates the need to certify entanglement and tolerates arbitrarily low detection efficiency. That is, we demonstrate that genuine randomness can be generated via coherent measurements beyond standard steerable states and even beyond entangled states under realistic experimental conditions. These results extend the scope of quantum resources for generating nonlocal correlations beyond measurement incompatibility, revealing the operational power of coherent measurements.
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.