The geometrical aspects of the bell inequalities

Paolo Dai Pra, Michele Pavon, Neeraja Sahasrabudhe

Reinhold A. Bertlmann, Heide Narnhofer, Walter E Thirring

We work in the real Hilbert space ${\mathcal{H}}_{s}$ of Hermitian Hilbert-Schmidt operators and show that the entanglement witness which shows the maximal violation of a generalized Bell inequality (GBI) is a tangent functional to the convex set $S\ensuremath{\subset}{\mathcal{H}}_{s}$ of separable states. This violation equals the Euclidean distance in ${\mathcal{H}}_{s}$ of the entangled state to S and thus entanglement, GBI, and tangent functional are only different aspects of the same geometric picture. This is explicitly illustrated in the example of two spins, where also a comparison with familiar Bell inequalities is presented.

Reinhold A. Bertlmann

I present my encounter with John Bell at CERN, our collaboration and joint work in particle physics. I also will recall our quantum debates and give my personal view on Bell's fundamental work on quantum theory, in particular, on contextuality and nonlocality of quantum physics. Some mathematical and geometric aspects of entanglement are discussed as influence of Bell's Theorem. Finally, I make some historical comments on the experimental side of Bell inequalities.

Louis Sica

Samson Abramsky, Lucién Hardy

Bell inequalities play a central role in the study of quantum nonlocality and entanglement, with many applications in quantum information. Despite the huge literature on Bell inequalities, it is not easy to find a clear conceptual answer to what a Bell inequality is, or a clear guiding principle as to how they may be derived. In this paper, we introduce a notion of logical Bell inequality which can be used to systematically derive testable inequalities for a very wide variety of situations. There is a single clear conceptual principle, based on purely logical consistency conditions, which underlies our notion of logical Bell inequalities. We show that in a precise sense, all Bell inequalities can be taken to be of this form. Our approach is very general. It applies directly to any family of sets of commuting observables. Thus it covers not only the $n$-partite scenarios to which Bell inequalities are standardly applied, but also Kochen-Specker configurations, and many other examples. There is much current work on experimental tests for contextuality. Our approach directly yields, in a systematic fashion, testable inequalities for a very general notion of contextuality. There has been much work on obtaining proofs of Bell's theorem ``without inequalities'' or ``without probabilities.'' These proofs are seen as being in a sense more definitive and logically robust than the inequality-based proofs. On the hand, they lack the fault-tolerant aspect of inequalities. Our approach reconciles these aspects, and in fact shows how the logical robustness can be converted into systematic, general derivations of inequalities with provable violations. Moreover, the kind of strong non-locality or contextuality exhibited by the GHZ argument or by Kochen-Specker configurations can be shown to lead to maximal violations of the corresponding logical Bell inequalities. Thus the qualitative and the quantitative aspects are combined harmoniously.

E. C. G. Sudarshan, Tony Rothman