Bounding single-copy information causality violations
Marco Pompili, Costantino Budroni
Information causality is a physical principle that constrains bipartite post-quantum nonlocal correlations from information-theoretic assumptions. A direct characterization of the correlations satisfying it, however, remains difficult because the defining entropic condition must hold for all admissible protocols in the corresponding task. Here, we formulate the single-copy information causality problem as an optimization over all protocol parameters and simplify it by proving a deterministic reduction. We then show that generic adaptive multi-copy protocols can be represented as single-copy protocols applied to an effective behavior obtained by local wirings. As a consequence, for families of correlations closed under wirings, excluding single-copy violations suffices to exclude all finite-copy adaptive-protocol violations. We formulate the resulting membership and set-inclusion problems as optimization problems and discuss possible semidefinite programming relaxations. As an application, we study expansions of the information causality functional around zero-capacity channels, generalizing a method recently employed by Gachechiladze and Miklin to derive the Tsirelson--Landau--Masanes boundary from information causality. For expansions centered on channels whose output distribution has full support, imposing the second-order constraints for all single-copy protocols characterizes exactly the set of macroscopic locality in the CHSH scenario. Expanding instead around appropriate constant-output channels with perturbations that change the channel support, we show that every single-copy IC violation can be witnessed already at first order with a channel of arbitrarily small capacity.
quant-pharXiv:2610.32783•Oct 26, 2026•0 citations