We present a derivation and experimental implementation of a dimension-dependent contextuality inequality to certify both the quantumness and dimensionality of a given system. Existing methods for certification of the dimension of a quantum system can be cheated by using larger classical systems, creating a potential loophole in these benchmarks, or can in practice only be evaluated assuming pure quantum states. Our approach uses contextuality inequalities that cannot be violated by classical systems thus closing the previous loopholes. We validate this framework experimentally with photons, observing violations of a CHSH-based contextuality inequality and surpassing the qutrit bound of the CGLMP₄-based contextuality inequality. These show that contextuality can be used for noise-robust tests of the number of qubits.

Bell tests have become a powerful tool for quantifying security, randomness, entanglement, and many other properties, as well as for investigating fundamental physical limits. In all these cases, the specific experimental value of the Bell parameter is important as it leads to a quantitative conclusion. However, experimental implementations can also produce experimental data with (apparent) signaling. This signaling can be attributed to systematic errors occurring due to weaknesses in the experimental designs. Here we point out the importance, for quantitative applications, to identify and address this problem. We present a set of experiments with polarization-entangled photons in which we identify common sources of systematic errors and demonstrate approaches to avoid them. In addition, we establish the highest experimental value for the Bell-CHSH parameter obtained after applying strategies to minimize signaling that we are aware of: S = 2.812 ± 0.003 and negligible systematic errors. The experiments did not randomize the settings and did not close the locality loophole.

Quantum technologies provide many applications for information processing tasks that are impossible to realize within classical physics. These capabilities include such fundamental resources as generating secure, i.e., private and unpredictable random values. Yet, the problem of quantifying the amount of generated randomness is still not fully solved. This work presents a comprehensive analysis of the design and performance optimization of a quantum random number generator (QRNG) based on Bell inequality violations. We investigate key protocol parameters, including the smoothing parameter (𝜖_s), test round probability (𝛾), and switching delays, and their effects on the generation rate and quality of randomness. We identify optimal ranges for 𝛾 and 𝑝_Ω (the protocol’s nonaborting probability) to balance the trade-off between randomness consumption and net randomness generation. We investigate the impact of the laser power on the overall generation rate. We explore the impact of switching delays on the system’s performance, providing strategies to mitigate these effects. The work provides practical guidelines for the efficient and secure design of QRNG systems and other cryptographic protocols.

Symmetry is one of the cornerstones of modern physics and has profound implications in different areas. In symmetry-protected topological systems, symmetries are responsible for protecting surface states, which are at the heart of the fascinating properties exhibited by these materials. When the symmetry protecting the edge mode is broken, the topological phase becomes trivial. By engineering losses that break the symmetry protecting a topological Hermitian phase, we show that a new genuinely non-Hermitian symmetry emerges, which protects and selects one of the boundary modes: the topological monomode. Moreover, the topology of the non-Hermitian system can be characterized by an effective Hermitian Hamiltonian in a higher dimension. To corroborate the theory, we experimentally investigated the non-Hermitian one- and two-dimensional SSH models using photonic lattices and observed dynamically generated monomodes in both cases. We classify the systems in terms of the (non-Hermitian) symmetries that are present and calculate the corresponding topological invariants.

Quantum mechanics has greatly impacted our understanding of microscopic nature. One of the key concepts of this theory is generalized measurements, which have proven useful in various quantum information processing tasks. However, despite their significance, they have not yet been shown empirically to provide an advantage in quantum randomness certification and expansion protocols. This investigation explores scenarios where generalized measurements can yield more than 1 bit of certified randomness with a single-qubit system measurement on untrusted devices and against a quantum adversary. We compare the robustness of several protocols to exhibit the advantage of exploiting generalized measurements. In our analysis of experimental data, we were able to obtain 1.21 bits of min-entropy from a measurement taken on one qubit of an entangled state. We also obtained 1.07 bits of min-entropy from an experiment with quantum state preparation and generalized measurement on a single qubit. We also provide finite data analysis for a protocol using generalized measurements and the Entropy Accumulation Theorem. Our exploration demonstrates the potential of generalized measurements to improve the certification of quantum sources of randomness and enhance the security of quantum cryptographic protocols and other areas of quantum information.

We show that weakly entangled states can improve communication over a qubit channel using only separate, interference-free, measurements of individual photons. We introduce a communication task corresponding to the cryptographic primitive known as secret sharing and show that all steerable two-qubit isotropic states provide a quantum advantage in the success rate using only product measurements. Furthermore, we show that such measurements can even reveal communication advantages from noisy partially entangled states that admit no quantum steering. We then go further and consider a stochastic variant of secret sharing based on more-sophisticated, yet standard, partial Bell-state analyzers, and show that this reveals advantages also for a range of unsteerable isotropic states. By preparing polarization qubits in unsteerable states, we experimentally demonstrate increased success rates of both secret-sharing tasks beyond the best entanglement-unassisted qubit protocol. Our results reveal the capability of simple and scalable measurements in entanglement-assisted quantum communication to overcome large amounts of noise.

One of the striking properties of quantum mechanics is the occurrence of the Bell-type non-locality. They are a fundamental feature of the theory that allows two parties that share an entangled quantum system to observe correlations stronger than possible in classical physics. In addition to their theoretical significance, non-local correlations have practical applications, such as device-independent randomness generation, providing private unpredictable numbers even when they are obtained using devices delivered by an untrusted vendor. Thus, determining the quantity of certifiable randomness that can be produced using a specific set of non-local correlations is of significant interest. In this paper, we present an experimental realization of recent Bell-type operators designed to provide private random numbers that are secure against adversaries with quantum resources. We use semi-definite programming to provide lower bounds on the generated randomness in terms of both min-entropy and von Neumann entropy in a device-independent scenario. We compare experimental setups providing Bell violations close to the Tsirelson's bound with lower rates of events, with setups having slightly worse levels of violation but higher event rates. Our results demonstrate the first experiment that certifies close to two bits of randomness from binary measurements of two parties. Apart from single-round certification, we provide an analysis of finite-key protocol for quantum randomness expansion using the Entropy Accumulation theorem and show its advantages compared to existing solutions.

Dense coding is the seminal example of how entanglement can boost qubit communication, from sending one bit to sending two bits. This is made possible by projecting separate particles onto a maximally entangled basis. We investigate more general communication tasks, in both theory and experiment, and show that simpler measurements enable strong and sometimes even optimal entanglement-assisted qubit communication protocols. Using only partial Bell state analysers for two qubits, we demonstrate quantum correlations that cannot be simulated with two bits of classical communication. Then, we show that there exists an established and operationally meaningful task for which product measurements are sufficient for the strongest possible quantum predictions based on a maximally entangled two-qubit state. Our results reveal that there are scenarios in which the power of entanglement in enhancing quantum communication can be harvested in simple and scalable optical experiments.

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.