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arXiv:quant-ph/0610097 · Physical Review Letters

Quantum Nonlocality and Beyond: Limits from Nonlocal Computation

Noah Linden, Sandu Popescu, Anthony J. Short, Andreas Winter

Published Oct 30, 2007• 186 citations
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Abstract

We address the problem of "nonlocal computation," in which separated parties must compute a function without any individual learning anything about the inputs. Surprisingly, entanglement provides no benefit over local classical strategies for such tasks, yet stronger nonlocal correlations allow perfect success. This provides intriguing insights into the limits of quantum information processing, the nature of quantum nonlocality, and the differences between quantum and stronger-than-quantum nonlocal correlations.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.99.180502

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We address the problem of "nonlocal computation," in which separated parties must compute a function without any individual learning anything about the inputs. Surprisingly, entanglement provides no benefit over local classical strategies for such tasks, yet stronger nonlocal correlations allow perfect success. This provides intriguing insights into the limits of quantum information processing, the nature of quantum nonlocality, and the differences between quantum and stronger-than-quantum nonlocal correlations.
Nonlocality refers to correlations between spatially separated parties that are stronger than those explained by the existence of local hidden variables. Quantum mechanics is known to allow some nonlocal correlations between particles in a phenomena known as entanglement. We explore several aspects of nonlocality in general and how they relate to quantum mechanics. First, we construct a hierarchy of theories with nonlocal correlations stronger than those allowed in quantum mechanics and derive several results about these theories. We show that these theories include codes that can store an amount of information exponential in the number of physical bits used. We use this result to demonstrate an unphysical consequence of theories with stronger-than-quantum correlations: learning even an approximate description of states in such theories would be practically impossible. Next, we consider the difficult problem of determining whether specific correlations are nonlocal. We present a novel learning algorithm and show that it provides an outer bound on the set of local states, and can therefore be used to identify some nonlocal states. Finally, we put nonlocal correlations to work by showing that the entanglement present in the vacuum of a quantum field can be used to detect spacetime curvature. We quantify how the entangling power of the quantum field varies as a function of spacetime curvature.
It has previously been shown that quantum nonlocality offers no benefit over classical correlations for performing a distributed task known as nonlocal computation. This is where separated parties must compute the value of a function without individually learning anything about the inputs. We show that giving the parties some knowledge of the inputs, however small, is sufficient to ``unlock'' the power of quantum mechanics to outperform classical mechanics. This role of information held locally gives insight into the general question of when quantum nonlocality gives an advantage over classical physics. Our results also reveal an interesting feature of the nonlocality embodied in the celebrated task of Clauser, Horne, Shimony, and Holt.
Nonlocality and its connections to entanglement are fundamental features of quantum mechanics that have found numerous applications in quantum information science. A set of correlations is said to be nonlocal if it cannot be reproduced by spacelike-separated parties sharing randomness and performing local operations. An important practical consideration is that the runtime of the parties has to be shorter than the time it takes light to travel between them. One way to model this restriction is to assume that the parties are computationally bounded. We therefore initiate the study of nonlocality under computational assumptions and derive the following results: (a) We define the set NeL\mathsf{NeL}NeL (not-efficiently-local) as consisting of all bipartite states whose correlations arising from local measurements cannot be reproduced with shared randomness and \emph{polynomial-time} local operations. (b) Under the assumption that the Learning With Errors problem cannot be solved in \emph{quantum} polynomial-time, we show that NeL=ENT\mathsf{NeL}=\mathsf{ENT}NeL=ENT, where ENT\mathsf{ENT}ENT is the set of \emph{all} bipartite entangled states (pure and mixed). This is in contrast to the standard notion of nonlocality where it is known that some entangled states, e.g. Werner states, are local. In essence, we show that there exist (efficient) local measurements producing correlations that cannot be reproduced through shared randomness and quantum polynomial-time computation. (c) We prove that if NeL=ENT\mathsf{NeL}=\mathsf{ENT}NeL=ENT unconditionally, then BQP≠PP\mathsf{BQP}\neq\mathsf{PP}BQP=PP. In other words, the ability to certify all bipartite entangled states against computationally bounded adversaries gives a non-trivial separation of complexity classes. (d) Using (c), we show that a certain natural class of 1-round delegated quantum computation protocols that are sound against PP\mathsf{PP}PP provers cannot exist.
Understanding the role that quantum entanglement plays as a resource in various information processing tasks is one of the crucial goals of quantum information theory. Here we propose an alternative perspective for studying quantum entanglement: distributed computation of functions without communication between nodes. To formalize this approach, we propose identity games. Surprisingly, despite no signaling, we obtain that nonlocal quantum strategies beat classical ones in terms of winning probability for identity games originating from certain bipartite and multipartite functions. Moreover we show that, for a majority of functions, access to general nonsignaling resources boosts success probability two times in comparison to classical ones for a number of large enough outputs. Because there are no constraints on the inputs and no processing of the outputs in the identity games, they detect very strong types of correlations: absolute nonlocality.
Despite the success of quantum mechanics in predicting the outcomes of experiments in many branches of physics, the foundations of the theory have remained subject of research and dispute. At the basis of this struggle with the theory lie the phenomena of nonlocality and entanglement. Since it was first predicted by Bell in 1964, nonlocality was not only verified in numerous experiments, but also identified as a useful resource for quantum information processing. Thus, the study of nonlocality is important both from a fundamental point of view and with respect to new applications in quantum information theory, such as secure cryptography and randomness generation. The identification of entanglement as a resource for quantum information led to a strong theoretical effort devoted to its characterisation and detection. Many of the resulting mathematical tools find application in several domains of physics. Although the only known way to create nonlocal correlations is to measure entangled quantum systems, it has been shown that entanglement and nonlocality constitute two inequivalent properties. Therefore, in the light of the success of entanglement theory, it is of interest to also devise a resource theory of nonlocality. The task of this thesis is to develop such a theoretical framework for the characterisation of nonlocality as a resource. To gain a better understanding of nonlocal correlations it will be necessary to investigate correlation scenarios that go beyond the situation originally considered by Bell. In doing so, this thesis provides new description of nonlocality that also have implications for the characterisation of quantum correlations and the detection of new forms of nonlocality. The first question we address is how nonlocality can consistently be defined in a scenario of arbitrarily many parties that may collaborate among each other. To this end we recognise which are the allowed physical operations in this situation and then define nonlocality as the resource that cannot be created by these operations. Our approach shows that the conventional definition of multipartite nonlocality, adopted by the community so far, is inconsistent with this operational definition; we further propose and analyse new models that do not suffer from these inconsistencies. Furthermore, we show that our findings have implications for the characterisation of quantum correlations. A recent approach to describe the set of quantum correlation consists in using principles inspired from information theory. By using a special instance of the models we defined earlier we show a fundamental limitation of this approach: no bipartite information principle is sufficient to single out the set of quantum correlations from the set of nonsignalling correlations. We then developed a description of nonlocality in an even more generalised scenario of several parties. Motivated by a result of Popescu we study scenarios where the parties are allowed to perform not only a single but sequences of measurements on their systems. Characterising nonlocality also in this scenario in operational terms and defining local models compatible with this definition, we show that a new form of nonlocality can be detected Lastly, we examine the problem of detecting the presence of nonlocality in a multipartite scenario when one is given only partial access to the global system. We find that one can verify that the total system must display nonlocality, even though the accessible subsystems only exhibit local correlations.
It is well known that entangled quantum states are nonlocal: the corrrelations between local measurements carried out on these states cannot be reproduced by local hidden variable models. Svetlichny, followed by others, showed that multipartite quantum states are more nonlocal than bipartite ones in the sense that even some nonlocal classical models with (super-luminal) communication between some of the parties cannot reproduce the quantum correlations. Here we study in detail the kinds of nonlocality present in quantum states. More precisely, we enquire what kinds of classical communication patterns cannot reproduce quantum correlations. By studying the extremal points of the space of all multiparty probability distributions, in which all parties can make one of a pair of measurements each with two possible outcomes, we find a necessary condition for classical nonlocal models to reproduce the statistics of all quantum states. This condition extends and generalizes work of Svetlichny and others in which it was showed that a particular class of classical nonlocal models, the ``separable'' models, cannot reproduce the statistics of all multiparticle quantum states. Our condition shows that the nonlocality present in some entangled multiparticle quantum states is much stronger than previously thought. We also study the sufficiency of our condition.