No Arabic abstract
Contextuality has been identified as a potential resource responsible for the quantum advantage in several tasks. It is then necessary to develop a resource-theoretic framework for contextuality, both in its standard and generalized forms. Here we provide a formal resource-theoretic approach for generalized contextuality based on a physically motivated set of free operations with an explicit parametrisation. Then, using an efficient linear programming characterization for the contextual set of prepared-and-measured statistics, we adapt known resource quantifiers for contextuality and nonlocality to obtain natural monotones for generalized contextuality in arbitrary prepare-and-measure experiments.
Starting from arbitrary sets of quantum states and measurements, referred to as the prepare-and-measure scenario, a generalized Spekkens non-contextual ontological model representation of the quantum statistics associated to the prepare-and-measure scenario is constructed. The generalization involves the new notion of a reduced space which is non-trivial for non-tomographically complete scenarios. A new mathematical criterion, called unit separability, is formulated as the relevant classicality criterion -- the name is inspired by the usual notion of quantum state separability. Using this criterion, we derive a new upper bound on the cardinality of the ontic space. Then, we recast the unit separability criterion as a (possibly infinite) set of linear constraints, from which two separate converging hierarchies of algorithmic tests to witness non-classicality or certify classicality are obtained. We relate the complexity of these algorithmic tests to that of a class of vertex enumeration problems. Finally, we reformulate our results in the framework of generalized probabilistic theories and discuss the implications for simplex-embeddability in such theories.
In addition to the important role of contextuality in foundations of quantum theory, this intrinsically quantum property has been identified as a potential resource for quantum advantage in different tasks. It is thus of fundamental importance to study contextuality from the point of view of resource theories, which provide a powerful framework for the formal treatment of a property as an operational resource. In this contribution we review recent developments towards a resource theory of contextuality and connections with operational applications of this property.
Within the framework of generalized noncontextuality, we introduce a general technique for systematically deriving noncontextuality inequalities for any experiment involving finitely many preparations and finitely many measurements, each of which has a finite number of outcomes. Given any fixed sets of operational equivalences among the preparations and among the measurements as input, the algorithm returns a set of noncontextuality inequalities whose satisfaction is necessary and sufficient for a set of operational data to admit of a noncontextual model. Additionally, we show that the space of noncontextual data tables always defines a polytope. Finally, we provide a computationally efficient means for testing whether any set of numerical data admits of a noncontextual model, with respect to any fixed operational equivalences. Together, these techniques provide complete methods for characterizing arbitrary noncontextuality scenarios, both in theory and in practice. Because a quantum prepare-and-measure experiment admits of a noncontextual model if and only if it admits of a positive quasiprobability representation, our techniques also determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of such a representation.
Self-testing represents the strongest form of certification of a quantum system. Here we investigate theoretically and experimentally the question of self-testing non-projective quantum measurements. That is, how can one certify, from observed data only, that an uncharacterised measurement device implements a desired non-projective positive-operator-valued-measure (POVM). We consider a prepare-and-measure scenario with a bound on the Hilbert space dimension, which we argue is natural for this problem since any measurement can be made projective by artificially increasing the Hilbert space dimension. We develop methods for (i) robustly self-testing extremal qubit POVMs (which feature either three or four outcomes), and (ii) certify that an uncharacterised qubit measurement is non-projective, or even a genuine four-outcome POVM. Our methods are robust to noise and thus applicable in practice, as we demonstrate in a photonic experiment. Specifically, we show that our experimental data implies that the implemented measurements are very close to certain ideal three and four outcome qubit POVMs, and hence non-projective. In the latter case, the data certifies a genuine four-outcome qubit POVM. Our results open interesting perspective for strong `black-box certification of quantum devices.
We investigate the correlations that can arise between Alice and Bob in prepare-and-measure communication scenarios where the source (Alice) and the measurement device (Bob) can share prior entanglement. The paradigmatic example of such a scenario is the quantum dense coding protocol, where the communication capacity of a qudit can be doubled if a two-qudit entangled state is shared between Alice and Bob. We provide examples of correlations that actually require more general protocols based on higher-dimensional entangled states. This motivates us to investigate the set of correlations that can be obtained from communicating either a classical or a quantum $d$-dimensional system in the presence of an unlimited amount of entanglement. We show how such correlations can be characterized by a hierarchy of semidefinite programming relaxations by reducing the problem to a non-commutative polynomial optimization problem. We also introduce an alternative relaxation hierarchy based on the notion of informationally-restricted quantum correlations, which, though it represents a strict (non-converging) relaxation scheme, is less computationally demanding. As an application, we introduce device-independent tests of the dimension of classical and quantum systems that, in contrast to previous results, do not make the implicit assumption that Alice and Bob share no entanglement. We also establish several relations between communication with and without entanglement as resources for creating correlations.