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Oxford University Press eBooks

Why the Quantum?

Jeffrey Bub

Published Feb 11, 2016• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

What principle excludes superquantum correlations that don’t violate the nosignaling principle? In an argument using PR boxes in a 2009 Nature paper, Pawlowski and colleagues show that the Tsirelson bound – the limit achievable in a simulation of a Popescu–Rohrlich correlation with quantum resources – follows from an information-theoretic principle they call “information causality.” For three qubits, it is now known that there are superquantum correlations that cannot be excluded by a bipartite principle like information causality, so this principle does not completely characterize quantum correlations. An intriguing principle, developed by Cabello as the “exclusivity principle” or “Specker’s principle” (from Ernst Specker’s story about a seer from Nineva), and separately by Fritz and colleagues as the principle of “local orthogonality,” yields the Tsirelson bound, and also rules out correlations beyond the quantum limit for the Klyachko correlation and other cases where contextuality or nonlocality is relevant.

DOI
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718536.003.0009

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What principle excludes superquantum correlations that don’t violate the nosignaling principle? In an argument using PR boxes in a 2009 Nature paper, Pawlowski and colleagues show that the Tsirelson bound – the limit achievable in a simulation of a Popescu–Rohrlich correlation with quantum resources – follows from an information-theoretic principle they call “information causality.” For three qubits, it is now known that there are superquantum correlations that cannot be excluded by a bipartite principle like information causality, so this principle does not completely characterize quantum correlations. An intriguing principle, developed by Cabello as the “exclusivity principle” or “Specker’s principle” (from Ernst Specker’s story about a seer from Nineva), and separately by Fritz and colleagues as the principle of “local orthogonality,” yields the Tsirelson bound, and also rules out correlations beyond the quantum limit for the Klyachko correlation and other cases where contextuality or nonlocality is relevant.
Information causality states that the information obtainable by a receiver cannot be greater than the communication bits from a sender, even if they utilize no-signaling resources. This physical principle successfully explains some boundaries between quantum and postquantum nonlocal correlations, where the obtainable information reaches the maximum limit. We show that no-signaling resources of pure partially entangled states produce randomness (or noise) in the communication bits, and achievement of the maximum limit is impossible, i.e., the information causality principle is insufficient for the full identification of the quantum boundaries already for bipartite settings. The nonlocality inequalities such as so-called the Tsirelson inequality are extended to show how such randomness affects the strength of nonlocal correlations. As a result, a relation followed by most of quantum correlations in the simplest Bell scenario is revealed. The extended inequalities reflect the cryptographic principle such that a completely scrambled message cannot carry information.
Information causality (IC) posits that communicating m classical bits cannot give the receiver access to more than m bits of information about the sender's independent data. Although IC holds in quantum theory and excludes a broad class of supra-quantum correlations, its validity for the almost-quantum set has remained open. This semidefinite relaxation of the quantum set satisfies nontrivial communication complexity, no advantage for non-local computation, macroscopic locality, local orthogonality, and numerical evidence has suggested that it may also satisfy IC. Here we show that almost-quantum correlations violate IC, and do so without bound. Unlike earlier violations of IC, which rely on biased guesses, ours is driven by zero-error certificates: each is rare but never wrong, carries information linear in its probability, and vouches for many of the sender's bits at once. This establishes a sharp dichotomy: either IC is a valid physical principle that excludes these correlations, or any nonsignalling theory realizing them admits no mutual information obeying consistency, data processing and the chain rule. In the latter case, we discuss why the chain rule is the natural property to relinquish, and how this possibility relates to histories-based formulations and to locality defined relative to the state rather than presupposed in a fixed spacetime.
A physical explanation for quantum bounds to nonlocality (Tsirelson's bound) is a fundamental problem in quantum theory, for it is known that no-signaling alone fails to reproduce this limit. Here, information indistinguishability is presented as the indistinguishability of qubits or more general bits, and it suggests an answer to the nonlocality conundrum, ultimately placing it as the origin to quantum limits. Indistinguishability is also connected to exclusivity principle, and it is shown that indistinguishability leads to quantum correlation bounds. This suggests indistinguishability be as fundamental as non-locality and relativistic causality for nonlocal realism.
Specker's principle, the condition that pairwise orthogonal propositions must be jointly orthogonal (or rather, the 'exclusivity principle' that follows from it), has been much investigated recently within the programme of finding physical principles to characterize quantum mechanics. Specker's principle, however, largely appears to lack a physical justification. In this paper, I present a proof of Specker's principle from three assumptions (made suitably precise): the existence of 'maximal entanglement', the existence of 'non-maximal measurements' and no-signalling. I discuss these three assumptions and describe canonical examples of non-Specker sets of propositions satisfying any two of them. These examples display analogies with various approaches to the interpretation of quantum mechanics, including retrocausation. I also discuss connections with the work of Popescu & Rohrlich. The core of the proof (and the main example violating no-signalling) is illustrated by a variant of Specker's tale of the seer of Nineveh, with which I open the paper. This article is part of the theme issue 'Quantum contextuality, causality and freedom of choice'.