English

A linear program for testing nonclassicality and an open-source implementation

Quantum Physics 2024-04-05 v3

Abstract

A well motivated method for demonstrating that an experiment resists any classical explanation is to show that its statistics violate generalized noncontextuality. We here formulate this problem as a linear program and provide an open-source implementation of it which tests whether or not any given prepare-measure experiment is classically-explainable in this sense. The input to the program is simply an arbitrary set of quantum states and an arbitrary set of quantum effects; the program then determines if the Born rule statistics generated by all pairs of these can be explained by a classical (noncontextual) model. If a classical model exists, it provides an explicit model. If it does not, then it computes the minimal amount of noise that must be added such that a model does exist, and then provides this model. We generalize all these results to arbitrary generalized probabilistic theories (and accessible fragments thereof) as well; indeed, our linear program is a test of simplex-embeddability.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.11905,
  title  = {A linear program for testing nonclassicality and an open-source implementation},
  author = {John H. Selby and Elie Wolfe and David Schmid and Ana Belén Sainz and Vinicius P. Rossi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.11905},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

4 pages plus appendices, 4 figures and many diagrams. Comments welcome!