No Arabic abstract
Quantum correlations are critical to our understanding of nature, with far-reaching technological and fundamental impact. These often manifest as violations of Bells inequalities, bounds derived from the assumptions of locality and realism, concepts integral to classical physics. Many tests of Bells inequalities have studied pairs of correlated particles; however, the immense interest in multi-particle quantum correlations is driving the experimental frontier to test systems beyond just pairs. All experimental violations of Bells inequalities to date require supplementary assumptions, opening the results to one or more loopholes, the closing of which is one of the most important challenges in quantum science. Individual loopholes have been closed in experiments with pairs of particles and a very recent result closed the detection loophole in a six ion experiment. No experiment thus far has closed the locality loopholes with three or more particles. Here, we distribute three-photon Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger entangled states using optical fibre and free-space links to independent measurement stations. The measured correlations constitute a test of Mermins inequality while closing both the locality and related freedom-of-choice loopholes due to our experimental configuration and timing. We measured a Mermin parameter of 2.77 +/- 0.08, violating the inequality bound of 2 by over 9 standard deviations, with minimum tolerances for the locality and freedom-of-choice loopholes of 264 +/- 28 ns and 304 +/- 25 ns, respectively. These results represent a significant advance towards definitive tests of the foundations of quantum mechanics and practical multi-party quantum communications protocols.
Entanglement swapping entangles two particles that have never interacted[1], which implicitly assumes that each particle carries an independent local hidden variable, i.e., the presence of bilocality[2]. Previous experimental studies of bilocal hidden variable models did not fulfill the central requirement that the assumed two local hidden variable models must be mutually independent and hence their conclusions are flawed on the rejection of local realism[3-5]. By harnessing the laser phase randomization[6] rising from the spontaneous emission to the stimulated emission to ensure the independence between entangled photon-pairs created at separate sources and separating relevant events spacelike to satisfy the no-signaling condition, for the first time, we simultaneously close the loopholes of independent source, locality and measurement independence in an entanglement swapping experiment in a network. We measure a bilocal parameter of 1.181$pm$0.004 and the CHSH game value of 2.652$pm$0.059, indicating the rejection of bilocal hidden variable models by 45 standard deviations and local hidden variable models by 11 standard deviations. We hence rule out local realism and justify the presence of quantum nonlocality in our network experiment. Our experimental realization constitutes a fundamental block for a large quantum network. Furthermore, we anticipate that it may stimulate novel information processing applications[7,8].
Non-locality stands nowadays not only as one of the cornerstones of quantum theory, but also plays a crucial role in quantum information processing. Several experimental investigations of nonlocality have been carried out over the years. In spite of their fundamental relevance, however, all previous experiments do not consider a crucial ingredient that is ubiquitous in quantum networks: the fact that correlations between distant parties are mediated by several, typically independent, sources of quantum states. Here, using a photonic setup we investigate a quantum network consisting of three spatially separated nodes whose correlations are mediated by two independent sources. This scenario allows for the emergence of a new kind of non-local correlations that we experimentally witness by violating a novel Bell inequality. Our results provide the first experimental proof-of-principle of generalizations of Bells theorem for networks, a topic that has attracted growing attention and promises a novel route for quantum communication protocols.
It is shown that the ensemble ${p (alpha),|alpha>|alpha^*>}$ where $p (alpha)$ is a Gaussian distribution of finite variance and $| alpha>$ is a coherent state can be better discriminated with an entangled measurement than with any local strategy supplemented by classical communication. Although this ensemble consists of products of quasi-classical states, it exhibits some quantum nonlocality. This remarkable effect is demonstrated experimentally by implementing the optimal local strategy together with a joint nonlocal strategy that yields a higher fidelity.
Contextuality and nonlocality are non-classical properties exhibited by quantum statistics whose implications profoundly impact both foundations and applications of quantum theory. In this paper we provide some insights into logical contextuality and inequality-free proofs. The former can be understood as the possibility version of contextuality, while the latter refers to proofs of quantum contextuality/nonlocality that are not based on violations of some noncontextuality (or Bell) inequality. The present work aims to build a bridge between these two concepts from what we call possibilistic paradoxes, which are sets of possibilistic conditions whose occurrence implies contextuality/nonlocality. As main result, we demonstrate the existence of possibilistic paradoxes whose occurrence is a necessary and sufficient condition for logical contextuality in a very important class of scenarios. Finally, we discuss some interesting consequences arising from the completeness of these possibilistic paradoxes.
We show that for all $nge3$, an example of an $n$-partite quantum correlation that is not genuinely multipartite nonlocal but rather exhibiting anonymous nonlocality, that is, nonlocal but biseparable with respect to all bipartitions, can be obtained by locally measuring the $n$-partite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state. This anonymity is a manifestation of the impossibility to attribute unambiguously the underlying multipartite nonlocality to any definite subset(s) of the parties, even though the correlation can indeed be produced by nonlocal collaboration involving only such subsets. An explicit biseparable decomposition of these correlations is provided for any partitioning of the $n$ parties into two groups. Two possible applications of these anonymous GHZ correlations in the device-independent setting are discussed: multipartite secret sharing between any two groups of parties and bipartite quantum key distribution that is robust against nearly arbitrary leakage of information.