Quantum theory is known to lead to correlations between the outcomes of measurements performed on distant systems that are strictly stronger than those obtained by any classical theory. Such correlations, termed nonlocal, highlight the radical departure of quantum theory from classical formulations of physics. Here, we study fundamental questions about the nature of nonlocal correlations in quantum theory, using as a tool the recently developed field of EPR steering. In the second part of the thesis, we construct new methods for the certification of the dimension of quantum systems and apply our techniques to quantum random number certification.
Quantum theory is known to lead to correlations between the outcomes of measurements performed on distant systems that are strictly stronger than those obtained by any classical theory. Such correlations, termed nonlocal, highlight the radical departure of quantum theory from classical formulations of physics. Here, we study fundamental questions about the nature of nonlocal correlations in quantum theory, using as a tool the recently developed field of EPR steering. In the second part of the thesis, we construct new methods for the certification of the dimension of quantum systems and apply our techniques to quantum random number certification.
Abstract Entanglement and Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) steering are nonlocal quantum correlations, which are relevant resources for quantum information protocols. EPR steering, or quantum steering, refers to the correlation where a party might ‘steer’, or modify, the state of another, which is spatially separated. Entanglement is a symmetric resource while steering is asymmetrical, since it depends on the direction of the effect. Due to these different characteristics and the therefore different possible applications, there has been both theoretical and experimental research on forms to certify the distinct quantum nonlocal correlations. In recent years, alongside the investigation on quantum correlations between two systems, there has been a great interest in investigating multipartite/multimode entanglement as well as steering, since they include a high dimension and it may be possible to store more information than in a single qubit. In this review, we will summarize the different criteria and measures that have been developed for the characterization of these two kinds of correlations. We first focus on bipartite entanglement and steering. We then review the progress that has been made in the investigation of multipartite quantum correlations. We revise the theoretical work in quantum nonlocal correlation witnesses and measures, which respectively allow one to certify that the system is entangled or presents EPR steering, and give a quantification of the content of these correlations in the system. Then, we briefly review the experiments that have been designed and that demonstrate multipartite quantum correlations. We also include applications in quantum information protocols, in particular in quantum teleportation and quantum cryptography.
Despite the success of quantum mechanics in predicting the outcomes of experiments in many branches of physics, the foundations of the theory have remained subject of research and dispute. At the basis of this struggle with the theory lie the phenomena of nonlocality and entanglement. Since it was first predicted by Bell in 1964, nonlocality was not only verified in numerous experiments, but also identified as a useful resource for quantum information processing. Thus, the study of nonlocality is important both from a fundamental point of view and with respect to new applications in quantum information theory, such as secure cryptography and randomness generation. The identification of entanglement as a resource for quantum information led to a strong theoretical effort devoted to its characterisation and detection. Many of the resulting mathematical tools find application in several domains of physics. Although the only known way to create nonlocal correlations is to measure entangled quantum systems, it has been shown that entanglement and nonlocality constitute two inequivalent properties. Therefore, in the light of the success of entanglement theory, it is of interest to also devise a resource theory of nonlocality. The task of this thesis is to develop such a theoretical framework for the characterisation of nonlocality as a resource. To gain a better understanding of nonlocal correlations it will be necessary to investigate correlation scenarios that go beyond the situation originally considered by Bell. In doing so, this thesis provides new description of nonlocality that also have implications for the characterisation of quantum correlations and the detection of new forms of nonlocality. The first question we address is how nonlocality can consistently be defined in a scenario of arbitrarily many parties that may collaborate among each other. To this end we recognise which are the allowed physical operations in this situation and then define nonlocality as the resource that cannot be created by these operations. Our approach shows that the conventional definition of multipartite nonlocality, adopted by the community so far, is inconsistent with this operational definition; we further propose and analyse new models that do not suffer from these inconsistencies. Furthermore, we show that our findings have implications for the characterisation of quantum correlations. A recent approach to describe the set of quantum correlation consists in using principles inspired from information theory. By using a special instance of the models we defined earlier we show a fundamental limitation of this approach: no bipartite information principle is sufficient to single out the set of quantum correlations from the set of nonsignalling correlations. We then developed a description of nonlocality in an even more generalised scenario of several parties. Motivated by a result of Popescu we study scenarios where the parties are allowed to perform not only a single but sequences of measurements on their systems. Characterising nonlocality also in this scenario in operational terms and defining local models compatible with this definition, we show that a new form of nonlocality can be detected Lastly, we examine the problem of detecting the presence of nonlocality in a multipartite scenario when one is given only partial access to the global system. We find that one can verify that the total system must display nonlocality, even though the accessible subsystems only exhibit local correlations.
This thesis is about probing aspects of the foundations of quantum mechanics. Firstly, two notions of quantum nonlocality are explored: EPR-steering, the ability to control a remote quantum state, and Bell nonlocality, the inconsistency of a theory with local causality. A necessary and sufficient witness of Einstein-Podolsky- Rosen (EPR) steering is derived for a two qubit system employing only correlations between two arbitrary dichotomic measurements on each party. It is demonstrated that all states that are EPR-steerable with such correlations are also Bell nonlocal, a surprising equivalence between these two fundamental concepts of quantum mechanics. Next, testing modifications of the quantum mechanical canonical commutation relations is addressed. These are properties of some quantum gravity theories that involve an effective minimal length. It is shown that optomechanical probes of position noise spectrum of macroscopic oscillators can produce constraints on these theories. A comparison with current and future realistic experiments reveals the potential to beat constraints from direct experiments on elementary particles. Finally, it is studied how such modifications of quantum mechanics manifest in the theory of general continuous quantum position measurements. Several behaviours are found that deviate strongly from that of standard commutation relations.
Quantum theory admits correlations between distant parties that are stronger than those permitted by classical physics. Such correlations, which are termed nonlocal, have been studied extensively since their discovery by John Bell in 1964. This thesis makes progress on various aspects of quantum nonlocality both from a foundational and practical perspective. We begin by studying a foundational question on the relationship between nonlocality and quantum entanglement. We show that the strongest form of nonlocality, also called pseudo-telepathy or full nonlocality, can be demonstrated by non-maximally entangled states and prove that all pure entangled states can demonstrate full nonlocality in the many-copy scenario. We also provide non-trivial examples of fully nonlocal mixed states. We then turn to the study of another phenomenon in quantum theory which is essential in almost all demonstrations of non-classicality—measurement incompatibility. We generalise the notion of measurement incompatibility and show that our notion has strong operational relevance: it captures the randomness in the outcomes of an untrusted measurement device against a classical adversary. We use our formalism to derive new bounds on the experimental losses and noise that can be tolerated in quantum communication protocols before they become insecure. We then begin a systematic study of routed Bell experiments, a variant of standard Bell experiments that was introduced to demonstrate nonlocality over long distances in the presence of losses and noise. We formalize the notion of genuine long-range quantum correlations in routed Bell experiments and develop numerical and analytical tools to characterize them. We show that routed Bell experiments allow for the demonstration of long-range quantum correlations at arbitrarily large distances using only entangled qubit states. We then prove the security of fully device-independent (DI) quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols based on routed Bell tests and quantify the resulting improvement in key rate and distance compared to standard DI QKD protocols.
The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering is a subtle intermediate correlation between entanglement and Bell nonlocality. It not only theoretically completes the whole picture of non-local effects but also practically inspires novel quantum protocols in specific scenarios. However, a verification of EPR steering is still challenging due to difficulties in bounding unsteerable correlations. In this survey, the basic framework to study the bipartite EPR steering is discussed, and general techniques to certify EPR steering correlations are reviewed.
Quantum information has the potential to disrupt the present computational landscape. Much of this potential rests on the existence of efficient quantum algorithms for classically intractable problems and of quantum cryptographic protocols for tasks that are provably impossible to realize classically. At the heart of many quantum advantages is one of the most counterintuitive features of quantum mechanics, known as entanglement. The central motivating question of this thesis is the following: if quantum devices will perform tasks that are beyond the reach of classical devices, can we hope to certify that they are performing these tasks correctly? Bell's theorem, a landmark result in physics, provides a partial answer to this question: it asserts that measurements on spatially isolated, but entangled, particles can result in outcomes that are correlated in a way that cannot be explained by any local hidden variable theory (such as Newtonian physics). A direct operational consequence of this theorem is that one can devise a statistical test to certify the presence of entanglement (and hence of genuine quantumness). Remarkably, nature allows us to take this certification one step further: in some cases, the correlation of measurement outcomes is sufficient to single out a unique quantum setup compatible with this correlation. This phenomenon is often referred to as self-testing, and is the central topic of this thesis. In the first part of this thesis, we review the basic terminology and results in the theory of self-testing. We then explore a concrete application to the problem of verifiably delegating a quantum computation. Our main technical contribution is a test that robustly certifies products of single-qubit Clifford measurements on many EPR pairs. We employ this test to obtain a protocol which allows a classical user to verifiably delegate her quantum computation to two spatially isolated quantum servers. The overall complexity of our protocol is near-optimal, requiring resources that scale almost linearly in the size of the circuit being delegated. In the second part of this thesis, the driving question is the following: what is the class of quantum states and measurements that can be certified through self-testing? Does self-testing only apply to a few special cases, like EPR pairs or copies of EPR pairs, or are these instances of a more general phenomenon? One of the main results of this thesis is that we settle this question for the case of bipartite states. We show the existence of a self-testing correlation for any pure bipartite entangled state of any finite local dimension. We then move on to explore the multipartite case, and we show that a significantly larger class of states can be self-tested than was previously known. This includes all multipartite partially entangled GHZ states, and more generally all multipartite qudit states which admit a Schmidt decomposition. In the final part of this thesis, we explore connections of the theory of self-testing to basic questions about entanglement and quantum correlation sets. In particular, we set out to understand the expressive power of infinite-dimensional quantum systems. We consider two questions: can spatially isolated quantum systems of infinite dimension produce correlations that are unattainable by finite-dimensional systems? Does there exist a correlation that cannot be attained exactly by spatially isolated quantum systems (not even infinite-dimensional ones), but can be approximated arbitrarily well by a sequence of finite or infinite-dimensional systems? The first question was posed by Tsirelson in 1993, and its answer has been elusive. One of the main results of this thesis is a resolution of this question. The second question is better known as the "non-closure of the set of quantum correlations", and was answered affirmatively in a breakthrough of Slofstra. We give a new elementary proof of this result which leverages one of our self-testing results and a phenomenon known as embezzlement.