English

Exclusion reshapes the operational manifestation of preparation contextuality

Quantum Physics 2026-05-12 v1

Abstract

Replacing the task of retrieval with exclusion changes how preparation contextuality manifests operationally under parity-oblivious constraints, with exclusion showing a quantum advantage where retrieval does not. We introduce the parity-oblivious random exclusion code (POREC) and show that for prime symbol size mm, classical and preparation-noncontextual encodings provide a tight noncontextual bound. For the first nontrivial case (two digits, three symbols), our derived exact qubit optimum violates this bound, in contrast to parity-oblivious retrieval, which displays no quantum advantage. This characteristic difference is absent without parity constraints. For general prime mm, qubit strategies achieve a quantum-to-noncontextual gap that grows linearly relative to the random exclusion code (REC) gap, exceeding both parity-oblivious retrieval and standard REC. The exact qubit bound yields a sharp semi-device-independent certification of dimension d3d \geq 3. Our analysis of noise robustness demonstrates POREC to be amenable for experimental implementation on existing prepare-and-measure platforms, establishing parity-oblivious exclusion as a distinct operational probe of preparation contextuality, as well as a practical information processing protocol with wide applications.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.08745,
  title  = {Exclusion reshapes the operational manifestation of preparation contextuality},
  author = {Pritam Roy and Thansingh Jankawat and Ranendu Adhikary and A. S. Majumdar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.08745},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

5 pages (double column) + 13 pages (single column), 1 figure; Comments are welcome