The correlation bell inequalities

Costantino Budroni, Giovanni Morchio

Louis Sica

Violation of Bell inequalities is widely regarded as a definitive test for non-locality. However, Bell correlational inequalities must always be satisfied by all jointly present, cross-correlated data. The correlations of variable pairs obtained in repeated runs are not cross-correlated in this way and are not required to satisfy the Bell inequality. In addition, by using information regarded as non-local, proper joint correlations may be computed among counterfactual and measured variables. These correlations satisfy the Bell inequality, but are spatially non-stationary in angle. By using a simple symmetry condition, such considerations may be extended to inequalities in probabilities. The latter may be derived directly from correlational inequalities developed by Clauser, Horne, Shimony and Holt (CHSH). Violation of either correlational or probabilistic Bell inequalities then implies that the Bell correlation cannot be accounted for by a stochastic process that is spatially stationary in angle coordinates. However, other processes may still be allowed.

Arthur I. Fine

Marek Kanter

The usual Bell-type inequalities involve correlations between observables. Inequalities of the Bell-type are presented which involve correlations between the probabilities associated with states and which can be used as a test for hidden variables in quantum mechanics independent of the Bell inequalities. The inequalities are universal in the sense that they are valid for all separable metric state spaces, as opposed to the usual Bell inequalities whose specific form is a function of the state space of the candidate classical model. The inequalities are harder to prove than the usual Bell-type inequalities because no essential restrictions on the state space are made.

Cezary Śliwa

Ravishankar Ramanathan

The characterization of the set of quantum correlations is a problem of fundamental importance in quantum information. The question whether every proper (tight) Bell inequality is violated in quantum theory is an intriguing one in this regard. Here we make significant progress in answering this question, by showing that every tight Bell inequality is violated by ``almost-quantum'' correlations, a semidefinite programming relaxation of the set of quantum correlations. As a consequence, we show that many (classes of) Bell inequalities including two-party correlation Bell inequalities and multioutcome nonlocal computation games, which do not admit quantum violations, are not facets of the classical Bell polytope. To do this, we make use of the intriguing connections between Bell correlations and the graph-theoretic Lov\'asz-theta set, discovered by Cabello-Severini-Winter (CSW). We also exploit connections between the cut polytope of graph theory and the classical correlation Bell polytope, to show that correlation Bell inequalities that define facets of the lower dimensional correlation polytope are violated in quantum theory.