No Arabic abstract
Two parts of an entangled quantum state can have a correlation in their joint behavior under measurements that is unexplainable by shared classical information. Such correlations are called non-local and have proven to be an interesting resource for information processing. Since non-local correlations are more useful if they are stronger, it is natural to ask whether weak non-locality can be amplified. We give an affirmative answer by presenting the first protocol for distilling non-locality in the framework of generalized non-signaling theories. Our protocol works for both quantum and non-quantum correlations. This shows that in many contexts, the extent to which a single instance of a correlation can violate a CHSH inequality is not a good measure for the usefulness of non-locality. A more meaningful measure follows from our results.
Topological systems, such as fractional quantum Hall liquids, promise to successfully combat environmental decoherence while performing quantum computation. These highly correlated systems can support non-Abelian anyonic quasiparticles that can encode exotic entangled states. To reveal the non-local character of these encoded states we demonstrate the violation of suitable Bell inequalities. We provide an explicit recipe for the preparation, manipulation and measurement of the desired correlations for a large class of topological models. This proposal gives an operational measure of non-locality for anyonic states and it opens up the possibility to violate the Bell inequalities in quantum Hall liquids or spin lattices.
Quantum information processing is the emerging field that defines and realizes computing devices that make use of quantum mechanical principles, like the superposition principle, entanglement, and interference. In this review we study the information counterpart of computing. The abstract form of the distributed computing setting is called communication complexity. It studies the amount of information, in terms of bits or in our case qubits, that two spatially separated computing devices need to exchange in order to perform some computational task. Surprisingly, quantum mechanics can be used to obtain dramatic advantages for such tasks. We review the area of quantum communication complexity, and show how it connects the foundational physics questions regarding non-locality with those of communication complexity studied in theoretical computer science. The first examples exhibiting the advantage of the use of qubits in distributed information-processing tasks were based on non-locality tests. However, by now the field has produced strong and interesting quantum protocols and algorithms of its own that demonstrate that entanglement, although it cannot be used to replace communication, can be used to reduce the communication exponentially. In turn, these new advances yield a new outlook on the foundations of physics, and could even yield new proposals for experiments that test the foundations of physics.
Imagine a task in which a group of separated players aim to simulate a statistic that violates a Bell inequality. Given measurement choices the players shall announce an output based solely on the results of local operations -- which they can discuss before the separation -- on shared random data and shared copies of a so-called unit correlation. In the first part of this article we show that in such a setting the simulation of any bipartite correlation, not containing the possibility of signaling, can be made arbitrarily accurate by increasing the number of shared Popescu-Rohrlich (PR) boxes. This establishes the PR box as a simple asymptotic unit of bipartite nonlocality. In the second part we study whether this property extends to the multipartite case. More generally, we ask if it is possible for separated players to asymptotically reproduce any nonsignaling statistic by local operations on bipartite unit correlations. We find that non-adaptive strategies are limited by a constant accuracy and that arbitrary strategies on n resource correlations make a mistake with a probability greater or equal to c/n, for some constant c.
According to quantum theory, the outcomes obtained by measuring an entangled state necessarily exhibit some randomness if they violate a Bell inequality. In particular, a maximal violation of the CHSH inequality guarantees that 1.23 bits of randomness are generated by the measurements. However, by performing measurements with binary outcomes on two subsystems one could in principle generate up to two bits of randomness. We show that correlations that violate arbitrarily little the CHSH inequality or states with arbitrarily little entanglement can be used to certify that close to the maximum of two bits of randomness are produced. Our results show that non-locality, entanglement, and the amount of randomness that can be certified in a Bell-type experiment are inequivalent quantities. From a practical point of view, they imply that device-independent quantum key distribution with optimal key generation rate is possible using almost-local correlations and that device-independent randomness generation with optimal rate is possible with almost-local correlations and with almost-unentangled states.
Non-local correlations are not only a fascinating feature of quantum theory, but an interesting resource for information processing, for instance in communication-complexity theory or cryptography. An important question in this context is whether the resource can be distilled: Given a large amount of weak non-local correlations, is there a method to obtain strong non-locality using local operations and shared randomness? We partly answer this question by no: CHSH-type non-locality, the only possible non-locality of binary systems, which is not super-strong, but achievable by measurements on certain quantum states, has at best very limited distillability by any non-interactive classical method. This strongly extends and generalizes what was previously known, namely that there are two limits that cannot be overstepped: The Bell and Tsirelson bounds. Moreover, our results imply that there must be an infinite number of such bounds. A noticeable feature of our proof of this purely classical statement is that it is quantum mechanical in the sense that (both novel and known) facts from quantum theory are used in a crucial way to obtain the claimed results. One of these results, of independent interest, is that certain mixed entangled states cannot be distilled without communication. Weaker statements, namely limited distillability, have been known for Werner states.