Nonlocality and contextuality in extended Bell scenarios

Lucas Emanuel Antunes Porto, Gabriel Ruffolo, Rafael Rabelo +2 more

Abstract The relations between Bell nonlocality and Kochen–Specker contextuality have been subject of research from many different perspectives in the last decades. Recently, some interesting results on these relations have been explored in the so-called generalized Bell scenarios, that is, scenarios where Bell spatial separation (or agency independence) coexist with (at least one of the) parties’ ability to perform compatible measurements at each round of the experiment. When this party has an n-cycle compatiblity setup, it was first claimed that Bell nonlocality could not be concomitantly observed with contextuality at this party’s local experiment. However, by a more natural reading of the definition of locality, it turns out that both Bell nonlocality and local contextuality can, in fact, be jointly present. In spite of it, in this work we prove that in the simplest of those scenarios there cannot be arbitrary amounts of both of these two resources together. That is, in these cases we show that the violation of any Bell inequality limits the possible violations of any local noncontextuality inequality. We also explore this trade-off relation using quantifiers of nonlocality and contextuality, discussing how such a relation can be understood in terms of a ‘global’ notion of contextuality, and we study possible extensions of this result to other scenarios.

Swati Kumari, Sumit Mukherjee, R. Prabhu

Contextuality and measurement incompatibility are two fundamental aspects of nonclassicality, and their manifestations in observed quantum correlations are often deeply interconnected. Recently, measurement incompatibility has been studied in connection with nonlocality, particularly in terms of their robustness under various quantum channels. This line of investigation helps establish a connection between the channels that break nonlocality and those that break incompatibility. In this study, we focus on an asymmetric bipartite Bell scenario involving three and four inputs on Alice and Bob sides, respectively, with each of these inputs having dichotomous outcomes. Under the assumption of locality, the observed statistics in this asymmetric scenario obeys the Elegant Bell inequality (EBI). Here, we use a different version of the EBI that relies on the assumption of the preparation noncontextuality. By taking the violation of this noncontextual version of EBI as a witness of preparation contextuality we establish a connection between the channels that break contextuality and the channels that break triple-wise measurement incompatibility. Our results suggest that any channel which breaks EBI contextuality will also break Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) nonlocality; however, the reverse does not hold. We also show that a depolarising channel that breaks N-wise incompatibility can also break a certain form of contextuality, witnessed by a generalised inequality involving N measurements on one wing of a bipartite Bell scenario.

Lucas Emanuel Antunes Porto

Paul G. Kwiat

Peng Xue, Lei Xiao, Gabriel Ruffolo +4 more

Bell nonlocality and Kochen-Specker contextuality are two remarkable nonclassical features of quantum theory, related to strong correlations between outcomes of measurements performed on quantum systems. Both phenomena can be witnessed by the violation of certain inequalities, the simplest and most important of which are the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) and the Klyachko-Can-Binicioğlu-Shumovski (KCBS), for Bell nonlocality and Kochen-Specker contextuality, respectively. It has been shown that, using the most common interpretation of Bell scenarios, quantum systems cannot violate both inequalities concomitantly, thus suggesting a monogamous relation between the two phenomena. In this Letter, we show that the joint consideration of the CHSH and KCBS inequalities naturally calls for the so-called generalized Bell scenarios, which, contrary to the previous results, allows for joint violation of them. In fact, this result is not a special feature of such inequalities: We provide very strong evidence that there is no monogamy between nonlocality and contextuality in any scenario where both phenomena can be observed. We also implement a photonic experiment to test the synchronous violation of both CHSH and KCBS inequalities. Our results agree with the theoretical predictions, thereby providing experimental proof of the coexistence of Bell nonlocality and contextuality in the simplest scenario, and lead to novel possibilities where both concepts could be jointly employed for quantum information processing protocols.

Elena R. Loubenets