arXiv subjects

Nikolai Miklin

Publications and source records attributed to Nikolai Miklin.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Information Causality Characterizes the Set of Quantum Correlations in the Simplest Bell Scenario

Information causality (IC) was introduced as a physical principle constraining correlations in non-signaling theories. Whether it can recover the exact quantum correlation boundary, beyond Uffink's inequality, has remained an open question. Here, we combine its generalized formulation for correlated inputs with a new communication protocol to derive quantum Bell inequalities that exactly characterize the quantum correlations in the simplest bipartite Bell scenario, with two binary measurements. In particular, we derive the Tsirelson-Landau-Masanes criterion directly from IC. Thus, the generalized IC implies macroscopic locality, while we also present macroscopically local correlations that violate the generalized IC. This establishes that generalized IC is a strictly stronger principle in this scenario. Together with our earlier result that generalized IC implies a nontrivial communication complexity principle, these findings strengthen the role of information causality in explaining the limits of quantum nonlocality and provide a systematic route to deriving tighter bounds on the set of quantum correlations in more general Bell scenarios.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Sound and Efficient Certification of High-Quality Qubit Operations: Theory and Experiment

Can a high-quality quantum gate be certified when uncharacterized state-preparation and measurement errors are dominant? Can this be achieved with low experimental overhead? Here, we introduce a sound black-box certification protocol for a single-qubit gate based on a small set of fixed, deterministic sequences. From the data, the protocol derives finite-sample bounds on the gate's rotation eigenvalue, a gauge-invariant property. Its phase reveals the accuracy of the rotation angle, while its modulus quantifies the loss of coherence under repeated gate applications. We implement the protocol on a $^{40}\mathrm{Ca}^{+}$ trapped-ion processor and certify the $\sqrt{\mathrm{X}}$-gate rotation eigenvalue using $22\,000$ circuit executions, and demonstrate the robustness of certification to state-preparation and measurement errors by deliberately degrading the readout. Finally, we prove that these spectral constraints imply, up to a physically meaningful unitary change of basis, a rigorous average gate-fidelity lower bound for every time-independent qubit model compatible with the data. In both readout settings, the spectral bounds yield the same fidelity certificate of $99.94(3)\%$ with $99\%$ confidence. Our results establish a new standard for quantum-gate certification by combining soundness and experimental efficiency without requiring trusted reference operations, randomized circuits, or model fitting.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Bounds on Nonlocality and Random Access Codes from Extended Information Causality Principle

Information Causality was introduced as a physical principle for constraining the set of nonlocal correlations. In recent work, we proposed an extension of Information Causality that allows correlations among Alice's inputs. This extended principle yields tighter constraints than the original formulation and recovers part of the quantum boundary in certain Bell scenarios. In this work, we further investigate the implications of extended Information Causality and apply it to scenarios beyond binary inputs and outputs. We derive a family of quantum Bell inequalities that strengthen previously known constraints on quantum correlations. Using these inequalities, we obtain an improved analytical bound for the Collins-Gisin family of Bell inequalities. We also apply Information Causality to entanglement-assisted random access codes and derive new theory-independent analytical bounds on the winning probability. For this latter task, we prove that, despite being stronger in general, the extended principle does not improve the bounds obtained from the original Information Causality principle. This suggests that the existing Information Causality bounds are optimal for this class of random access codes.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Universal method for optimized robustness in self-testing of quantum resources

Self-testing is a phenomenon where the use of specific quantum states or measurements can be inferred solely from the correlations they generate. We introduce a universal method for conducting robustness analysis in the self-testing of various quantum resources. Unlike previous numerical approaches, which rely on selecting specific isometries, our method optimizes over equivalence transformations, thereby leading to tighter robustness bounds. This optimization employs the well-established technique of semidefinite programming relaxations for non-commuting polynomial optimization. Our method can be universally applied to diverse self-testing settings, including steerable assemblages in the Bell scenario, constellations of quantum states in the prepare-and-measure scenario, and entangled states in the steering scenario. We demonstrate the method's capability to surpass previously reported robustness bounds across a range of concrete examples.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Communication complexity bounds from information causality

Communication complexity, which quantifies the minimum communication required for distributed computation, offers a natural setting for investigating the capabilities and limitations of quantum mechanics in information processing. We introduce an information-theoretic approach to study one-way communication complexity based solely on the axioms of mutual information. Within this framework, we derive an extended statement of the information causality principle, which recovers known lower bounds on the communication complexities for a range of functions in a simplified manner and leads to new results. We further prove that the extended information causality principle is at least as strong as the principle of non-trivial communication complexity in bounding the strength of quantum correlations attainable in Bell experiments. Our study establishes a new route for exploring the fundamental limits of quantum technologies from an information-theoretic viewpoint.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Certifying Quantum Gates via Automata Advantage

There is growing interest in developing rigorous tests of quantumness that are feasible even before practical quantum advantages become a reality. Such tests not only aim to certify the quantum nature of a system but also serve as benchmarks for precise quantum control. In this work, we argue that promise problems, studied in the theory of finite automata, provide a natural framework for designing sound tests of quantum gate quality. Soundness, the property that only implementations of sufficiently high quality can pass the test, is a central requirement for meaningful certification. We study several promise problems relevant to quantum gate testing and establish separations between the memory resources required by quantum and classical finite automata to solve them. These separations form the theoretical basis for using promise problems as tests of quantumness. Finally, we show how results from automata theory, in particular the minimality of automata, can be used to derive soundness guarantees.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Classical certification of quantum gates under the dimension assumption

The rapid advancement of quantum hardware necessitates the development of reliable methods to certify its correct functioning. However, existing certification tests fall short, as they either suffer from systematic errors or do not guarantee that only a correctly functioning quantum device can pass the test. We introduce a certification method for quantum gates tailored for a practical server-user scenario, where a classical user tests the results of exact quantum computations performed by a quantum server. This method is free from the systematic state preparation and measurement (SPAM) errors. For single-qubit gates, including those that form a universal set for single-qubit quantum computation, we demonstrate that our approach offers soundness guarantees based solely on the dimension assumption. Additionally, for a highly-relevant phase gate - which corresponds experimentally to a $π/2$-pulse - we prove that the method's sample complexity scales as $\mathrm{O}(\varepsilon^{-1})$ relative to the average gate infidelity $\varepsilon$. By combining the SPAM-error-free and sound notion of certification with practical applicability, our approach paves the way for promising research into efficient and reliable certification methods for full-scale quantum computation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Simple and general bounds on quantum random access codes

Random access codes are a type of communication task that is widely used in quantum information science. The optimal average success probability that can be achieved through classical strategies is known for any random access code. However, only a few cases are solved exactly for quantum random access codes. In this paper, we provide bounds for the fully general setting of n independent variables, each selected from a d-dimensional classical alphabet and encoded in a D-dimensional quantum system subject to an arbitrary quantum measurement. The bound recovers the exactly known special cases, and we demonstrate numerically that even though the bound is not tight overall, it can still yield a good approximation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Sound certification of memory-bounded quantum computers

The rapid advancement of quantum hardware calls for the development of reliable methods to certify its correct functioning. However, existing certification tests often fall short: they either rely on flawless state preparation and measurement or lack soundness guarantees, meaning that they do not rule out incorrect implementations of the target operations by a quantum device. We introduce an approach, which we call quantum system quizzing, for the certification of quantum gates in a practical server-user scenario, where a classical user tests the results of quantum computation performed by a quantum server by checking its responses to a set of predesigned small-sized computational problems. Importantly, this approach does not require trusted state preparation and measurement and is thus inherently free from the associated systematic errors. For a wide range of relevant gate sets, including a universal one, we prove our certification protocol to be sound; i.e., it is guaranteed to reject any incorrect gate implementation, under the assumptions of a known Hilbert space dimension and context independence of error. A major technical challenge that we are first to resolve is recovering the tensor product structure of a multi-qubit system in the memory-bounded single-device setup. Finally, we prove the robustness of our protocol and validate its sample and computational efficiency through extensive numerical experiments. Our protocol is platform-agnostic and introduces a new paradigm for benchmarking and comparing diverse quantum architectures.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Information causality as a tool for bounding the set of quantum correlations

Information causality was initially proposed as a physical principle aimed at deriving the predictions of quantum mechanics on the type of correlations observed in the Bell experiment. In the same work, information causality was famously shown to imply the Uffink inequality that approximates the set of quantum correlations and rederives Tsirelson's bound of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality. This result found limited generalizations due to the difficulty of deducing implications of the information causality principle on the set of nonlocal correlations. In this paper, we present a simple technique for obtaining polynomial inequalities from information causality bounding the set of physical correlations in any bipartite Bell scenario. This result makes information causality an efficient tool for approximating the set of quantum correlations. To demonstrate our method, we derive a family of inequalities which non-trivially constrains the set of nonlocal correlations in Bell scenarios with binary outcomes and equal number of measurement settings. Finally, we propose an improved statement of the information causality principle and obtain a tighter constraint for the simplest Bell scenario, that goes beyond the Uffink inequality and recovers a part of the boundary of the quantum set.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Entanglement witnessing with untrusted detectors

We consider the problem of entanglement detection in the presence of faulty, potentially malicious detectors. A common - and, as of yet, the only - approach to this problem is to perform a Bell test in order to identify nonlocality of the measured entangled state. However, there are two significant drawbacks in this approach: the requirement to exceed a critical, and often high, detection efficiency, and much lower noise tolerance. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to this problem, which is resilient to the detection loophole and is based on the standard tool of entanglement witness. We discuss how the two main techniques to detection losses, namely the discard and assignment strategies, apply to entanglement witnessing. We demonstrate using the example of a two-qubit Bell state that the critical detection efficiency can be significantly reduced compared to the Bell test approach.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Quantum Bell inequalities from Information Causality -- tight for Macroscopic Locality

In a Bell test, the set of observed probability distributions complying with the principle of local realism is fully characterized by Bell inequalities. Quantum theory allows for a violation of these inequalities, which is famously regarded as Bell nonlocality. However, finding the maximal degree of this violation is, in general, an undecidable problem. Consequently, no algorithm can be used to derive quantum analogs of Bell inequalities, which would characterize the set of probability distributions allowed by quantum theory. Here we present a family of inequalities, which approximate the set of quantum correlations in Bell scenarios where the number of settings or outcomes can be arbitrary. We derive these inequalities from the principle of Information Causality, and thus, we do not assume the formalism of quantum mechanics. Moreover, we identify a subspace in the correlation space for which the derived inequalities give the necessary and sufficient conditions for the principle of Macroscopic Locality. As a result, we show that in this subspace, the principle of Information Causality is strictly stronger than the principle of Macroscopic Locality.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

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 $\eta$ 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 $N$th 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.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Causal inference with imperfect instrumental variables

Instrumental variables allow for quantification of cause and effect relationships even in the absence of interventions. To achieve this, a number of causal assumptions must be met, the most important of which is the independence assumption, which states that the instrument and any confounding factor must be independent. However, if this independence condition is not met, can we still work with imperfect instrumental variables? Imperfect instruments can manifest themselves by violations of the instrumental inequalities that constrain the set of correlations in the scenario. In this paper, we establish a quantitative relationship between such violations of instrumental inequalities and the minimal amount of measurement dependence required to explain them. As a result, we provide adapted inequalities that are valid in the presence of a relaxed measurement dependence assumption in the instrumental scenario. This allows for the adaptation of existing and new lower bounds on the average causal effect for instrumental scenarios with binary outcomes. Finally, we discuss our findings in the context of quantum mechanics.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2021

Experimental test of quantum causal influences

Since Bell's theorem, it is known that the concept of local realism fails to explain quantum phenomena. Indeed, the violation of a Bell inequality has become a synonym of the incompatibility of quantum theory with our classical notion of cause and effect. As recently discovered, however, the instrumental scenario -- a tool of central importance in causal inference -- allows for signatures of nonclassicality that do not hinge on this paradigm. If, instead of relying on observational data only, we can also intervene in our experimental setup, quantum correlations can violate classical bounds on the causal influence even in scenarios where no violation of a Bell inequality is ever possible. That is, through interventions, we can witness the quantum behaviour of a system that would look classical otherwise. Using a photonic setup -- faithfully implementing the instrumental causal structure and allowing to switch between the observational and interventional modes in a run to run basis -- we experimentally observe this new witness of nonclassicality for the first time. In parallel, we also test quantum bounds for the causal influence, showing that they provide a reliable tool for quantum causal modelling.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Quantum marginal problem and incompatibility

One of the basic distinctions between classical and quantum mechanics is the existence of fundamentally incompatible quantities. Such quantities are present on all levels of quantum objects: states, measurements, quantum channels, and even higher order dynamics. In this manuscript, we show that two seemingly different aspects of quantum incompatibility: the quantum marginal problem of states and the incompatibility on the level of quantum channels are in many-to-one correspondence. Importantly, as incompatibility of measurements is a special case of the latter, it also forms an instance of the quantum marginal problem. The generality of the connection is harnessed by solving the marginal problem for Gaussian and Bell diagonal states, as well as for pure states under depolarizing noise. Furthermore, we derive entropic criteria for channel compatibility, and develop a converging hierarchy of semi-definite programs for quantifying the strength of quantum memories.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Device-independent quantification of measurement incompatibility

Incompatible measurements, i.e., measurements that cannot be simultaneously performed, are necessary to observe nonlocal correlations. It is natural to ask, e.g., how incompatible the measurements have to be to achieve a certain violation of a Bell inequality. In this work, we provide the direct link between Bell nonlocality and the quantification of measurement incompatibility. This includes quantifiers for both incompatible and genuine-multipartite incompatible measurements. Our method straightforwardly generalizes to include constraints on the system's dimension (semi-device-independent approach) and on projective measurements, providing improved bounds on incompatibility quantifiers, and to include the prepare-and-measure scenario.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

A universal scheme for robust self-testing in the prepare-and-measure scenario

We consider the problem of certification of arbitrary ensembles of pure states and projective measurements solely from the experimental statistics in the prepare-and-measure scenario assuming the upper bound on the dimension of the Hilbert space. To this aim, we propose a universal and intuitive scheme based on establishing perfect correlations between target states and suitably-chosen projective measurements. The method works in all finite dimensions and allows for robust certification of the overlaps between arbitrary preparation states and between the corresponding measurement operators. Finally, we prove that for qubits, our technique can be used to robustly self-test arbitrary configurations of pure quantum states and projective measurements. These results pave the way towards the practical application of the prepare-and-measure paradigm to certification of quantum devices.

quant-ph↗