It is well known that certain measurement scenarios behave in a way which can not be explained by classical theories but by quantum theories. This behaviours are usually studied by Bell or non-contextuality (NC) inequalities. Knowing the maximal classical and quantum bounds of this inequalities is interesting, but tells us little about the quantum set Q of all quantum behaviours P. Despite having a constructive description of the quantum set associated to a given inequality, the freedom to choose quantum dimension, quantum states, and quantum measurements makes the shape of such convex bodies quite elusive. It is well known that a NC-inequality can be associated to a graph and the quantum set is a combinatorial object. Extra conditions, like Bell concept of parts, may restrict the behaviours achievable within quantum theory for a given scenario. For the simplest case, CHSH inequality, the NC and Bell versions share the same quantum bound. By exploring a family of intermediate coloured graphs, we show that CHSH NC quantum set is strictly larger than CHSH Bell quantum set. In graph language, the coloured-THETA body of the coloured CHSH graph is a proper subset of the THETA body of its shadow graph.
It is well known that certain measurement scenarios behave in a way which can not be explained by classical theories but by quantum theories. This behaviours are usually studied by Bell or non-contextuality (NC) inequalities. Knowing the maximal classical and quantum bounds of this inequalities is interesting, but tells us little about the quantum set Q of all quantum behaviours P. Despite having a constructive description of the quantum set associated to a given inequality, the freedom to choose quantum dimension, quantum states, and quantum measurements makes the shape of such convex bodies quite elusive. It is well known that a NC-inequality can be associated to a graph and the quantum set is a combinatorial object. Extra conditions, like Bell concept of parts, may restrict the behaviours achievable within quantum theory for a given scenario. For the simplest case, CHSH inequality, the NC and Bell versions share the same quantum bound. By exploring a family of intermediate coloured graphs, we show that CHSH NC quantum set is strictly larger than CHSH Bell quantum set. In graph language, the coloured-THETA body of the coloured CHSH graph is a proper subset of the THETA body of its shadow graph.
The Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequalities are the most famous examples of Bell inequalities. Cabello, Severini, and Winter came up with a graph approach to noncontextuality inequalities, which connects some graph-theoretic concepts to quantum and classical correlations. For example, the theta body of the exclusivity graph can be associated with the set of correlations achieved by quantum theory. Following the Cabello-Severini-Winter (CSW) approach, one may think that the theta body of the CHSH graph TH(GCHSH) is equal to the quantum set of the CHSH Bell inequality QCHSH, but is this really true? All assumptions about the CHSH inequalities come from Bell scenarios, while the CSW approach only demands the exclusivity structure of a noncontextuality (NC) scenario. To deal with the extra structure related to the presence of different players in a Bell scenario like the CHSH one, the colored-graph approach was introduced. Does it make any difference to think about the CHSH scenario as a Bell one or a more general NC scenario? The Bell CHSH inequality is represented by a bicolored graph G and the NC CHSH inequality by a simple graph G, which is the shadow of the colored graph G. In general, we have that the theta body of the colored graph ${\ensuremath{\theta}}_{c}(\mathcal{G})$ is a subset of the theta body of its shadow graph TH(G) in the same way that the Lov\'asz number, which corresponds to the quantum bound, of the simple graph $\ensuremath{\vartheta}(G)$ is greater than or equal to the Lov\'asz number of the colored graph ${\ensuremath{\vartheta}}_{c}(\mathcal{G})$. In the case of the CHSH inequality, we have that $\ensuremath{\vartheta}(G)={\ensuremath{\vartheta}}_{c}(\mathcal{G})$. Does this accident also hold for the corresponding quantum sets? Is it true that $\mathrm{TH}(G)={\ensuremath{\theta}}_{c}(\mathcal{G})$, which would mean that every correlation reached by quantum theory applied to the CHSH NC scenario could also be obtained at the in principle more restrictive CHSH Bell scenario? In this paper our answer to such a question is negative. We show that ${\ensuremath{\theta}}_{c}(\mathcal{G})\ensuremath{\nsubseteq}\mathrm{TH}(G)$ and therefore that there are quantum correlations which cannot be obtained under Bell restrictions.
Non-contextuality (NC) and Bell inequalities can be expressed as bounds Ω for positive linear combinations S of probabilities of events, S≤Ω. Exclusive events in S can be represented as adjacent vertices of a graph called the exclusivity graph of S. In the case that events correspond to the outcomes of quantum projective measurements, quantum probabilities are intimately related to the Grötschel-Lovász-Schrijver theta body of the exclusivity graph. Then, one can easily compute an upper bound to the maximum quantum violation of any NC or Bell inequality by optimizing S over the theta body and calculating the Lovász number of the corresponding exclusivity graph. In some cases, this upper bound is tight and gives the exact maximum quantum violation. However, in general, this is not the case. The reason is that the exclusivity graph does not distinguish among the different ways exclusivity can occur in Bell-inequality (and similar) scenarios. An interesting question is whether there is a graph-theoretical concept which accounts for this problem. Here we show that, for any given N-partite Bell inequality, an edge-coloured multigraph composed of N single-colour graphs can be used to encode the relationships of exclusivity between each party's parts of the events. Then, the maximum quantum violation of the Bell inequality is exactly given by a refinement of the Lovász number that applies to these edge-coloured multigraphs. We show how to calculate upper bounds for this number using a hierarchy of semi-definite programs and calculate upper bounds for I3, I3322 and the three bipartite Bell inequalities whose exclusivity graph is a pentagon. The multigraph-theoretical approach introduced here may remove some obstacles in the program of explaining quantum correlations from first principles.
Bell inequalities reveal the fundamentally nonlocal character of quantum mechanics. In this regard, one of the interesting problems is to explore all possible Bell inequalities that demonstrate a gap between local and nonlocal quantum behaviour. This is useful for the geometric characterisation of the set of nonlocal correlations achievable within quantum theory. Moreover, it provides a systematic way to construct Bell inequalities that are tailored to specific quantum information processing tasks. This characterisation is well understood in the simplest (2,2,2) scenario, namely two parties performing two binary outcome measurements. However, beyond this setting, relatively few Bell inequalities are known, and the situation becomes particularly scarce in scenarios involving a greater number of outcomes. Here, we consider the (2,2,3) scenario, or two parties performing two three-outcome measurements, and characterise all Bell inequalities that can arise from the simplest sum-of-squares decomposition and are maximally violated by the maximally entangled state of local dimension three. We then utilise them to self-test this state, along with a class of three-outcome measurements.
Non-contextuality (NC) and Bell inequalities can be expressed as bounds Ω for positive linear combinations S of probabilities of events, S≤Ω. Exclusive events in S can be represented as adjacent vertices of a graph called the exclusivity graph of S. In the case that events correspond to the outcomes of quantum projective measurements, quantum probabilities are intimately related to the Grötschel-Lovász-Schrijver theta body of the exclusivity graph. Then, one can easily compute an upper bound to the maximum quantum violation of any NC or Bell inequality by optimizing S over the theta body and calculating the Lovász number of the corresponding exclusivity graph. In some cases, this upper bound is tight and gives the exact maximum quantum violation. However, in general, this is not the case. The reason is that the exclusivity graph does not distinguish among the different ways exclusivity can occur in Bell-inequality (and similar) scenarios. An interesting question is whether there is a graph-theoretical concept which accounts for this problem. Here we show that, for any given N-partite Bell inequality, an edge-coloured multigraph composed of N single-colour graphs can be used to encode the relationships of exclusivity between each party's parts of the events. Then, the maximum quantum violation of the Bell inequality is exactly given by a refinement of the Lovász number that applies to these edge-coloured multigraphs. We show how to calculate upper bounds for this number using a hierarchy of semi-definite programs and calculate upper bounds for I3, I3322 and the three bipartite Bell inequalities whose exclusivity graph is a pentagon. The multigraph-theoretical approach introduced here may remove some obstacles in the program of explaining quantum correlations from first principles.
We show that the noncontextual inequality proposed by Klyachko et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 020403 (2008)] belongs to a broader family of inequalities, one associated to each compatibility structure of a set of events (a graph), and its independence number. These have the surprising property that the maximum quantum violation is given by the Lovasz theta-function of the graph, which was originally proposed as an upper bound on its Shannon capacity. Furthermore, probabilistic theories beyond quantum mechanics may have an even larger violation, which is given by the so-called fractional packing number. We discuss in detail, and compare, the sets of probability distributions attainable by noncontextual, quantum, and generalized models; the latter two are shown to have semidefinite and linear characterizations, respectively. The implications for Bell inequalities, which are examples of noncontextual inequalities, are discussed. In particular, we show that every Bell inequality can be recast as a noncontextual inequality a la Klyachko et al.
Quantum self-testing is the task of certifying quantum states and measurements using the output statistics solely, with minimal assumptions about the underlying quantum system. It is based on the observation that some extremal points in the set of quantum correlations can only be achieved, up to isometries, with specific states and measurements. Here, we present a new approach for quantum self-testing in Bell non-locality scenarios, motivated by the following observation: the quantum maximum of a given Bell inequality is, in general, difficult to characterize. However, it is strictly contained in an easy-to-characterize set: the \emph{theta body} of a vertex-weighted induced subgraph (G,w) of the graph in which vertices represent the events and edges join mutually exclusive events. This implies that, for the cases where the quantum maximum and the maximum within the theta body (known as the Lovász theta number) of (G,w) coincide, self-testing can be demonstrated by just proving self-testability with the theta body of G. This graph-theoretic framework allows us to (i) recover the self-testability of several quantum correlations that are known to permit self-testing (like those violating the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) and three-party Mermin Bell inequalities for projective measurements of arbitrary rank, and chained Bell inequalities for rank-one projective measurements), (ii) prove the self-testability of quantum correlations that were not known using existing self-testing techniques (e.g., those violating the Abner Shimony Bell inequality for rank-one projective measurements). Additionally, the analysis of the chained Bell inequalities gives us a closed-form expression of the Lovász theta number for a family of well-studied graphs known as the Möbius ladders, which might be of independent interest in the community of discrete mathematics.