The correlations that violate the CHSH inequality are known to have complementary contributions from signaling and local indeterminacy. This complementarity is shown to represent a strengthening of Bell's theorem, and can be used to certify randomness in a device-independent way, assuming neither the validity of quantum mechanics nor even no-signaling. We obtain general nonlocal resources that can simulate the statistics of the singlet state, encompassing existing results. We prove a conjecture due to Hall (2010) and Kar et al. (2011) on the complementarity for such resources.
The correlations that violate the CHSH inequality are known to have complementary contributions from signaling and local indeterminacy. This complementarity is shown to represent a strengthening of Bell's theorem, and can be used to certify randomness in a device-independent way, assuming neither the validity of quantum mechanics nor even no-signaling. We obtain general nonlocal resources that can simulate the statistics of the singlet state, encompassing existing results. We prove a conjecture due to Hall (2010) and Kar et al. (2011) on the complementarity for such resources.
The correlations that violate the CHSH inequality are known to have complementary contributions from signaling and local indeterminacy. This complementarity is shown to represent a strengthening of Bell's theorem, and can be used to certify randomness in a device-independent way, assuming neither the validity of quantum mechanics nor even no-signaling. We obtain general nonlocal resources that can simulate the statistics of the singlet state, encompassing existing results. We prove a conjecture due to Hall (2010) and Kar et al. (2011) on the complementarity for such resources.
The correlations that violate the CHSH inequality are known to have complementary contributions from signaling and local indeterminacy. This complementarity is shown to represent a strengthening of Bell’s theorem, and can be used to certify randomness in a device-independent way, assuming neither the validity of quantum mechanics nor even no-signaling. We obtain general nonlocal resources that can simulate the statistics of the singlet state, encompassing existing results. We prove a conjecture due to Hall (2010) and Kar et al. (2011) on the complementarity for such resources. Further, we show that signaling leads to biasing of the marginals for these resources. This entails that no-signaling is a consequence of isotropic unbiasedness of the singlet statistics, by which is meant that the marginals are unbiased along any direction, and coincidence counts are determined only by the relative orientation of pairs of polarizers.
Simple quantitative measures of indeterminism and signaling, I and S, are defined for models of statistical correlations. It is shown that any such model satisfies a generalized Bell-type inequality, with tight upper bound B(I,S). This upper bound explicitly quantifies the complementary contributions required from indeterminism and signaling, for modeling any given violation of the standard Bell--Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (Bell-CHSH) inequality. For example, all models of the maximum quantum violation must either assign no more than 80 probability of occurrence to some underlying event, and/or allow a nonlocal change of at least 60 in an underlying marginal probability of one observer in response to a change in measurement setting by a distant observer. The results yield a corresponding complementarity relation between the numbers of local random bits and nonlocal signaling bits required to model a given violation. A stronger relation is conjectured for simulations of singlet states. Signaling appears to be a useful resource only if a ``gap'' condition is satisfied, corresponding to being able to nonlocally flip some underlying marginal probability p to its complementary value $1\ensuremath{-}p$.
Bell nonlocality is the experimentally testable incompatibility between quantum correlations and explanations based on local hidden variables. Its significance now extends beyond the foundations of quantum mechanics: a Bell-inequality violation can certify entanglement, randomness, measurement incompatibility, and cryptographic security without requiring a detailed model of the devices producing the observed data. This article develops the mathematical structure of Bell experiments and explains its role in device-independent quantum information. Conditional probability distributions are classified into local, quantum, and no-signalling sets; the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality is derived, and its classical, quantum, and algebraic limits are distinguished. Tsirelson’s bound is obtained from the CHSH operator, while Popescu-Rohrlich correlations demonstrate that no-signalling alone does not identify the quantum set. The relation between entanglement and nonlocality is examined through local entangled states, hidden nonlocality, and activation. Nonlocal games, semidefinite relaxations, self-testing, certified randomness, and device-independent quantum key distribution are treated as operational consequences of Bell violation. Particular attention is given to entropy accumulation, finite-data security, loophole-free experiments, and the limitations of device independence. Bell nonlocality emerges as both a foundational separation between classical and quantum causal models and a quantitative resource for cryptographic and informational tasks.
In quantum mechanics, nonlocality (a violation of a Bell inequality) is intimately linked to complementarity, by which we mean that consistently assigning values to different observables at the same time is not possible. Nonlocality can only occur when some of the relevant observables do not commute, and this noncommutativity makes the observables complementary. Beyond quantum mechanics, the concept of complementarity can be formalized in several distinct ways. Here we describe some of these possible formalizations and ask how they relate to nonlocality. We partially answer this question by describing two toy theories which display nonlocality and obey the no-signaling principle, although each of them does not display a certain kind of complementarity. The first toy theory has the property that it maximally violates the Clauser, Horn, Shimony, and Holt (CHSH) inequality, although the corresponding local observables are pairwise jointly measurable. The second toy theory also maximally violates the CHSH inequality, although its state space is classical and all measurements are mutually nondisturbing: if a measurement sequence contains some measurement twice with any number of other measurements in between, then these two measurements give the same outcome with certainty.
Given a pair of isolated devices that accept random binary inputs and return binary outputs, a user can deduce from the observed data alone if the underlying mechanism can be explained classically. Bell's theorem further states that a classical explanation can be ruled out if the devices perform certain measurements on an entangled quantum state, underpinning the security of cryptographic protocols that are device-independent (DI). For certain protocols, such as those performed in a tight space, it might be difficult to perfectly enforce the non-signaling assumption required in Bell's theorem. This prompts the question: is quantum nonlocality robust to such imperfections? We show that if a binary channel sends a noisy copy of one party's input to the other before any measurements take place, the answer is yes. We completely characterize the vertices and facets of the local polytope in this scenario, and identify Bell inequalities that certify non-signaling quantum correlations. This is possible even when a near perfect copy of the input is sent. We go on to show that the identified inequalities are more robust to depolarizing noise than the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality when certifying DI randomness in this scenario. In addition, we characterize the local polytope when both parties receive a noisy copy of each other's input and make similar conclusions, leaving many new potential Bell inequalities to be explored.