PhD Thesis: Non-contextual inequalities and dimensionality

by Johan Ahrens (Fysikum)

Friday 5 Jun 2015, 14:00 → 17:00 Europe/Stockholm

FB42

This PhD-thesis is based on the five experiments I have performed during mytime as a PhD-student. Three experiments are implementations of non-contextualinequalities and two are implementations of witness functions for classical- andquantum dimensions of sets of states. A dimension witness is an operator function that produce a value whenapplied to a set of states. This value has different upper bounds depending onthe dimension of the set of states and also depending on if the states are classicalor quantum. Therefore a dimension witness can only give a lower bound on thedimension of the set of states.The first dimension witness is based on the CHSH-inequality and has theability of discriminating between classical and quantum sets of states of two andthree dimensions, it can also indicate if a set of states must be of dimension fouror higher.The second dimension witness is based on a set theoretical representationof the possible combinations of states and measurements and grows with thedimension of the set of states you want to be able to identify, on the other handthere is a formula for expanding it to arbitrary dimension.Non-contextual hidden variable models is a family of hidden variable modelswhich include local hidden variable models, so in a sence non-contextual inequal-ities are a generalisation of Bellinequalities. The experiments presented in this thesis all use single particle quantum systems.The first experiment is a violation of the KCBS-inequality, this is the simplest correlation inequality which is violated by quantum mechanics.The second experiment is a violation of the Wright-inequality which is the simplest inequality violated by quantum mechanics, it contains only projectors and not correlations.The final experiment of the thesis is an implementation of a Hardy-like equality for non-contextuality, this means that the operators in the KCBS-inequality have been rotated so that one term in the sum will be zero for all non-contextual hidden variable models and we get a contradiction since quantum mechanicsgives a non-zero value for all terms.