Contextuality: Conceptual Issues, Operational Signatures, and Applications

Contextuality: Conceptual Issues, Operational Signatures, and Applications

 

 

How to go from the KS theorem to experimentally testable noncontextuality inequalities

Friday Jul 28, 2017
Speaker(s): 
Ravi Kunjwal
(MP4 Medium Res, MP3, PDF)

The purpose of this talk is twofold: one, to acquaint the wider community working mostly on Bell-Kochen-Specker contextuality with recent work on Spekkens’ contextuality that quantitatively demonstrates the sense in which Bell-Kochen-Specker contextuality is subsumed within Spekkens’ approach, and two, to argue that one can test for contextuality without appealing to a notion of sharpness which can needlessly restrict the scope of operational theories that could be considered as candidate explanations of experimental data.

Collection/Series: 
Contextuality: Conceptual Issues, Operational Signatures, and Applications
Scientific Areas: 
Quantum Information,
Quantum Foundations
 

 

Experimental state and measurement tomography for generalised probabilistic theories: bounding deviations from quantum theory via noncontextuality inequality violations

Friday Jul 28, 2017
Speaker(s): 
Michael Mazurek
(MP4 Medium Res, MP3, PDF)

In order to perform foundational experiments testing the correctness of quantum mechanics, one requires data analysis tools that do not assume quantum theory. We introduce a quantum-free tomography technique that fits experimental data to a set of states and measurement effects in a generalised probabilistic theory (GPT). (This is in contrast to quantum tomography, which fits data to sets of density operators and POVM elements.) We perform an experiment on the polarization degree of freedom of single photons, and find GPT descriptions of the states and measurements in our experiment.

Collection/Series: 
Contextuality: Conceptual Issues, Operational Signatures, and Applications
Scientific Areas: 
Quantum Information,
Quantum Foundations
 

 

Contextuality, the PBR theorem and their effects on simulation of quantum systems

Thursday Jul 27, 2017
Speaker(s): 
Angela Karanjai
(MP4 Medium Res, MP3, PDF)

This talk will be about constraints on any model which reproduces the qubit stabilizer sub-theory. We show that the minimum number of classical bits required to specify the state of an n-qubit system must scale as ~ n(n-3)/2 in any model that does not contradict the predictions of the quantum stabilizer sub-theory. The Gottesman-Knill algorithm, which is a strong simulation algorithm is in fact, very close to this bound as it scales at ~n(2n+1).

Collection/Series: 
Contextuality: Conceptual Issues, Operational Signatures, and Applications
Scientific Areas: 
Quantum Information,
Quantum Foundations

Pages