The necessity of randomness in tests of Bell inequalities

Federico Grasselli, Gláucia Murta, Hermann Kampermann +1 more

Device-independent (DI) protocols, such as DI conference key agreement (DICKA) and DI randomness expansion (DIRE), certify private randomness by observing nonlocal correlations when two or more parties test a Bell inequality. While most DI protocols are restricted to bipartite Bell tests, harnessing multipartite nonlocal correlations may lead to better performance. Here, we consider tripartite DICKA and DIRE protocols based on testing multipartite Bell inequalities, specifically: the Mermin-Ardehali-Belinskii-Klyshko (MABK) inequality, and the Holz and the Parity-CHSH inequalities introduced in the context of DICKA protocols. We evaluate the asymptotic performance of the DICKA (DIRE) protocols in terms of their conference key rate (net randomness generation rate), by deriving lower bounds on the conditional von Neumann entropy of one party's outcome and two parties' outcomes. For the Holz inequality, we prove a tight analytical lower bound on the one-outcome entropy and conjecture a tight lower bound on the two-outcome entropy. We additionally re-derive the analytical one-outcome entropy bound for the MABK inequality with a much simpler method and obtain a numerical lower bound on the two-outcome entropy for the Parity-CHSH inequality. Our simulations show that DICKA and DIRE protocols employing tripartite Bell inequalities can significantly outperform their bipartite counterparts. Moreover, we establish that genuine multipartite entanglement is not a precondition for multipartite DIRE while its necessity for DICKA remains an open question.

Carlos Palazuelos

Yang Liu, Xiao Yuan, Cheng Wu +14 more

A Bell test can rule out local realistic models and has potential applications in communication and information tasks. For example, a Bell's inequality violation can certify the presence of intrinsic randomness in measurement outcomes, which can be used to generate unpredictable random numbers. Nevertheless, a Bell test requires measurements that are chosen independently of environment in the test, as would be the case if the measurement setting choices were themselves intrinsically random. Such situation seems to create a ``bootstrapping problem'' recently addressed in the BIG Bell Test, a collection of various Bell tests using human choices. Here, we report in detail our experimental methods and results within the BIG Bell Test, specifically for a special type of Bell inequality, known as the measurement-dependent local inequality. With this inequality, even a small amount of measurement independence makes it possible to disprove local realistic models. The experiment utilizes human-generated random numbers in selecting the measurement settings and is implemented with space-like separation between two distant measurement sites. The experimental result violates a Bell's inequality, which cannot be explained by local hidden variable models with independence parameter (as defined in [G. P\"utz et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 190402 (2014)]) $l>0.10\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.05$. This result further quantifies the degree to which a local hidden variable model would need to constrain human choices, if it is to reproduce the experimental results.

Carlos Palazuelos

Lev Vaidman A

Jean-Daniel Bancal, Lana Sheridan, Valerio Scarani

Correlations that cannot be reproduced with local variables certify the generation of private randomness. Usually, the violation of a Bell inequality is used to quantify the amount of randomness produced. Here, we show how private randomness generated during a Bell test can be directly quantified from the observed correlations, without the need to process these data into an inequality. The frequency with which the different measurement settings are used during the Bell test can also be taken into account. This improved analysis turns out to be very relevant for Bell tests performed with a finite collection efficiency. In particular, applying our technique to the data of a recent experiment (Christensen et al 2013 Phys. Rev. Lett. 111 130406), we show that about twice as much randomness as previously reported can be potentially extracted from this setup.