Exponentially Decreasing Critical Detection Efficiency for Any Bell Inequality.

We address the problem of closing the detection efficiency loophole in Bell experiments, which is crucial for real-world applications. Every Bell inequality has a critical detection efficiency η that must be surpassed to avoid the detection loophole. Here, we propose a general method for reducing the critical detection efficiency of any Bell inequality to arbitrary low values. This is accomplished by entangling two particles in N orthogonal subspaces (e.g., N degrees of freedom) and conducting N Bell tests in parallel. Furthermore, the proposed method is based on the introduction of penalized N-product (PNP) Bell inequalities, for which the so-called simultaneous measurement loophole is closed, and the maximum value for local hidden-variable theories is simply the Nth power of the one of the Bell inequality initially considered. We show that, for the PNP Bell inequalities, the critical detection efficiency decays exponentially with N. The strength of our method is illustrated with a detailed study of the PNP Bell inequalities resulting from the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality.

Information Causality without Concatenation.

Information causality is a physical principle which states that the amount of randomly accessible data over a classical communication channel cannot exceed its capacity, even if the sender and the receiver have access to a source of nonlocal correlations. This principle can be used to bound the nonlocality of quantum mechanics without resorting to its full formalism, with a notable example of reproducing the Tsirelson's bound of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality. Despite being promising, the latter result found little generalization to other Bell inequalities because of the limitations imposed by the process of concatenation, in which several nonsignaling resources are put together to produce tighter bounds. In this work, we show that concatenation can be successfully replaced by limits on the communication channel capacity. It allows us to rederive and, in some cases, significantly improve all the previously known results in a simpler manner and apply the information causality principle to previously unapproachable Bell scenarios.

Quantifying Causal Influences in the Presence of a Quantum Common Cause.

Quantum mechanics challenges our intuition on the cause-effect relations in nature. Some fundamental concepts, including Reichenbach's common cause principle or the notion of local realism, have to be reconsidered. Traditionally, this is witnessed by the violation of a Bell inequality. But are Bell inequalities the only signature of the incompatibility between quantum correlations and causality theory? Motivated by this question, we introduce a general framework able to estimate causal influences between two variables, without the need of interventions and irrespectively of the classical, quantum, or even postquantum nature of a common cause. In particular, by considering the simplest instrumental scenario-for which violation of Bell inequalities is not possible-we show that every pure bipartite entangled state violates the classical bounds on causal influence, thus, answering in negative to the posed question and opening a new venue to explore the role of causality within quantum theory.

Experimental Characterization of Unsharp Qubit Observables and Sequential Measurement Incompatibility via Quantum Random Access Codes.

Unsharp measurements are increasingly important for foundational insights in quantum theory and quantum information applications. Here, we report an experimental implementation of unsharp qubit measurements in a sequential communication protocol, based on a quantum random access code. The protocol involves three parties; the first party prepares a qubit system, the second party performs operations that return both a classical and quantum outcome, and the latter is measured by the third party. We demonstrate a nearly optimal sequential quantum random access code that outperforms both the best possible classical protocol and any quantum protocol that utilizes only projective measurements. Furthermore, while only assuming that the involved devices operate on qubits and that detected events constitute a fair sample, we demonstrate the noise-robust characterization of unsharp measurements based on the sequential quantum random access code. We apply this characterization towards quantifying the degree of incompatibility of two sequential pairs of quantum measurements.

Experimental test of quantum causal influences.

Since Bell's theorem, it is known that local realism fails to explain quantum phenomena. Bell inequality violations manifestly show the incompatibility of quantum theory with classical notions of cause and effect. As recently found, however, the instrumental scenario-a pivotal tool in causal inference-allows for nonclassicality signatures going beyond this paradigm. If we are not limited to observational data and can intervene in our setup, then we can witness quantum violations of classical bounds on the causal influence among the involved variables even when no Bell-like violation is possible. That is, through interventions, the quantum behavior of a system that would seem classical can be demonstrated. Using a photonic setup-faithfully implementing the instrumental causal structure and switching between observation and intervention run by run-we experimentally witness such a nonclassicality. We also test quantum bounds for the causal influence, showing that they provide a reliable tool for quantum causal modeling.