Abstract Semi-device-independent certification of an unsharp instrument has recently been demonstrated (2019 New J. Phys. 21 083034) based on the sequential sharing of quantum advantages in a prepare-measure communication game by assuming the system to be qubit. In this work, we provide device-independent (DI) self-testing of the unsharp instrument through the quantum violation of two Bell inequalities where the devices are uncharacterized and the dimension of the system remains unspecified. We introduce an elegant sum-of-squares approach to derive the dimension-independent optimal quantum violation of Bell inequalities which plays a crucial role. Note that the standard Bell test cannot self-test the post-measurement states and consequently cannot self-test unsharp instrument. The sequential Bell test possess the potential to self-test an unsharp instrument. We demonstrate that there exists a trade-off between the maximum sequential quantum violations of the Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequality, and they form an optimal pair that enables the DI self-testing of the entangled state, the observables, and the unsharpness parameter. Further, we extend our study to the case of elegant Bell inequality and we argue that it has two classical bounds—the local bound and the non-trivial preparation non-contextual bound, lower than the local bound. Based on the sharing of preparation contextuality by three independent sequential observers, we demonstrate the DI self-testing of two unsharpness parameters. Since an actual experimental scenario involves losses and imperfection, we demonstrate robustness of our certification to noise.
We present a hitherto unexplored semi-device-independent (SDI) self-testing protocol designed to certify unitary operations within a variant of prepare-measure framework. We consider a communication game which we refer to as a variant of
3-bit prepare-measure random access code (PMRAC) involving two parties, Alice and Bob, who share a prior two-qubit quantum state. Alice encodes her message by applying unitary operations on her subsystem and sends it to Bob. To decode the message, Bob performs a measurement on the whole system. We demonstrate that the optimal quantum advantage of the variant of
3-bit PMRAC over the classical bound enables the self-testing of Alice's unitary operations and Bob's measurements. The derivation of the optimal quantum success probability is fully analytical. The approach is so elegant that it can be generalized for any arbitrary
n-bit PMRAC and may also be extended to other prepare-measure communication games.
Entangled basis measurements play a crucial role in distributing quantum entanglement between parties across a quantum network. In this work, we adopt a semi-device-independent approach that enables the self-testing of n-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) basis measurements without requiring shared entanglement between distant parties. Our method relies solely on input-output statistics from a communication scenario involving n spatially separated senders, each receiving two bits of input, and a single receiver with no input. We analyze the robustness of the proposed self-testing protocol. Additionally, we introduce a protocol for robust self-testing of the three-outcome partial Bell basis measurement that is easily implementable in an optical setup.