The assumption of measurement independence is required for a local deterministic model to conduct a Bell test. The violation of a Bell inequality by such a model implies that this assumption must be relaxed. The degree to which the assumption needs to be relaxed to achieve violation of some bipartite Bell inequalities, has been investigated recently in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 250404(2010), Phys. Rev. A 99, 012121(2019)]. In this work, we study the minimum degree of relaxation required to simulate violations of various well-known tripartite Bell inequalities and opens the possibility of relaxation in multipartite scenario. Local deterministic models are also provided to achieve the violations of these Bell inequalities.
Bell's inequality was originally derived under the assumption that experimenters are free to select detector settings independently of any local ``hidden variables'' that might affect the outcomes of measurements on entangled particles. This assumption has come to be known as ``measurement independence'' (also referred to as ``freedom of choice'' or ``settings independence''). For a two-setting, two-outcome Bell test, we derive modified Bell inequalities that relax measurement independence, for either or both observers, while remaining locally causal. We describe the loss of measurement independence for each observer using the parameters
M1 and
M2, as defined by Hall in 2010, and also by a more complete description that adds two new parameters, which we call $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{{M}_{1}}$ and $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{{M}_{2}}$, deriving a modified Bell inequality for each description. These ``relaxed'' inequalities subsume those considered in previous work as special cases, and quantify how much the assumption of measurement independence needs to be relaxed in order for a locally causal model to produce a given violation of the standard Bell-Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (Bell-CHSH) inequality. We show that both relaxed Bell inequalities are tight bounds on the CHSH parameter by constructing locally causal models that saturate them. For any given Bell inequality violation, the new two-parameter and four-parameter models each require significantly less mutual information between the hidden variables and measurement settings than previous models. We conjecture that the new models, with optimal parameters, require the minimum possible mutual information for a given Bell violation. We further argue that, contrary to various claims in the literature, relaxing freedom of choice need not imply superdeterminism.
A local deterministic model can reproduce Bell-inequality violations only if the hidden state depends on the measurement settings. Hall found the minimum such dependence for the singlet state [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 250404 (2010)] and posed the corresponding problem for the Mermin state [Phys. Rev. A 84, 022102 (2011)]. This paper solves it, for the
n-party GHZ-Mermin scenario at every
n≥3, with the marginals reproduced as well as the correlators. The minimum measurement-dependence fraction is
Fmin(n)=R/[2(R+1)], with
R=2⌊(n−1)/2⌋ the Mermin violation ratio:
1/3,2/5,4/9,8/17,…, always below
1/2. The lower bound follows from Mermin's inequality by a general overlap bound; the upper bound is an explicit model, uniform on the hidden-variable classes that violate the fewest constraints, with closed-form counts; a reduction theorem shows that for Mermin scenarios the marginals impose no additional dependence. The Mermin values are also certified by integer-arithmetic enumeration through
n=22. The formula was stated as a conjecture in the first version of this paper and was first proved, by a different route, by Wang, Yao and Chen; the proof here was obtained independently and the two agree. Every minimal contradiction of size
k among stabilizer constraints has correlator-only minimum
1/(k−1). With the marginals included the minimum is the same on every core of the
C5 ring cluster, on the size-4 and size-5 cores of
C4 and on every four-core of
C6, but larger on the size-6 and size-7 cores of
C4 and on 112 of the 1,920 five-cores of
C6, with exact certificates on both sides in every case.
It is well known that the effect of quantum nonlocality, as witnessed by violation of a Bell inequality, can be observed even when relaxing the assumption of measurement independence, i.e., allowing for the source to be partially correlated with the choices of measurement settings; however, what is the minimal amount of measurement independence needed to observe quantum nonlocality? Here we explore this question and consider models with strong measurement-dependent locality, where measurement choices can be perfectly determined in almost all rounds of the Bell test. Nevertheless, we show that quantum nonlocality can still be observed in this scenario, which we conjecture is minimal within the framework we use. We also discuss potential applications in randomness amplification.
The Bell test, as an important method for detecting nonlocality, is widely used in device-independent quantum information processing tasks. The security of these tasks is based on an assumption called measurement independence. Since this assumption is difficult to be guaranteed in practical Bell tests, it is meaningful to consider the effect of reduced measurement independence (i.e., measurement dependence) on Bell tests. Some research studies have shown that nonlocality can be detected even if measurement dependence exists. However, the relevant results are all based on bipartite Bell tests, and the results for multipartite Bell tests are still missing. In this paper, we explore this problem in the tripartite Svetlichny test. By considering flexible lower and upper bounds on the degree of measurement dependence, we obtain the relation among measurement dependence, guessing probability, and the maximal value of Svetlichny inequality. Our results reveal the case in which genuine nonlocality is nonexistent; at this point, the outcomes of the Bell test cannot be applied in device-independent quantum information processing tasks.
Besides well-known conditions of locality or factorisability, deriving the Bell inequalities requires assuming that the distribution of hidden variables and Alice's and Bob's measurement settings be independent of each other. We show that (analogously to violations of locality due to action at a distance) certain violations of this Measurement Independence assumption can be associated with a notion of signalling in principle, thus making them also testable in principle, and spell out the appropriate conditions. Accordingly, we show that by imposing no-signalling one can prove a version of Bell's theorem that does not require the assumption of Measurement Independence. We discuss the "Schulman model" as an example, as well as lessons for "experimental metaphysics".