Thispaperinvestigatesthepowersandlimitationsofquantum entanglementinthecontext of cooperative games of incomplete information. We give several examples of such nonlocal games where strategies that make use of entanglement outperform all possible classical strategies. One implication ofthese examplesis that entanglement canprofoundly affectthesoundness property of two-prover interactive proof systems. We then establish limits on the probability with which strategies making use of entanglement can win restricted types of nonlocal games. These upperbounds mayberegardedasgeneralizationsof Tsirelson-typeinequalities, which place bounds on the extent to which quantum information can allow for the violation of Bell inequalities. We also investigate the amount of entanglement required by optimal and nearly optimal quantum strategies forsome games.

Only finite precision measurements are experimentally reasonable, and they cannot distinguish a dense subset from its closure. We show that the rational vectors, which are dense in S 2, can be colored so that the contradiction with hidden variable theories provided by Kochen-Specker constructions does not obtain. Thus, in contrast to violation of the Bell inequalities, no quantum-over-classical advantage for information processing can be derived from the Kochen-Specker theorem alone.

No physical measurement can be performed with infinite precision. This leaves a loophole in the standard no-go arguments against non-contextual hidden variables. All such arguments rely on choosing special sets of quantum-mechanical observables with measurement outcomes that cannot be simulated non-contextually. As a consequence, these arguments do not exclude the hypothesis that the class of physical measurements in fact corresponds to a dense subset of all theoretically possible measurements with outcomes and quantum probabilities that can be recovered from a noncontextual hidden variable model. We show here by explicit construction that there are indeed such non-contextual hidden variable models, both for projection valued and positive operator valued measurements.

Bohmian mechanics is the most naively obvious embedding imaginable of Schrödinger’s equation into a completely coherent physical theory. It describes a world in which particles move in a highly non-Newtonian sort of way, one which may at first appear to have little to do with the spectrum of predictions of quantum mechanics. It turns out, however, that as a consequence of the defining dynamical equations of Bohmian mechanics, when a system has wave function ψ its configuration is typically random, with probability density ρ given by |ψ | 2, the quantum equilibrium distribution. It also turns out that the entire quantum formalism, operators as observables and all the rest, naturally emerges in Bohmian mechanics from the analysis of “measurements. ” This analysis reveals the status of operators as observables in the description of quantum phenomena, and facilitates a clear view of the range of applicability of the usual quantum mechanical formulas. Dedicated to Elliott Lieb on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Elliott will be (we fear unpleasantly) surprised to learn that he bears a greater responsibility for this paper than he could possibly imagine. We would of course like to think that our work addresses in some way the concern suggested by the title of his recent talks, The

The dichotomy between endophysical/intrinsic and exophysical/extrinsic perception concerns the question of how a model - mathematical, logical, computational - universe is perceived from inside or from outside, [71, 65, 66, 59, 60, 68, 67]. This distinction goes back in time at least to Archimedes, reported to have asked for a point outside the world from which one could move the earth. An exophysical perception is realized when the system is laid out and the experimenter peeps at the relevant features without changing the system. The information flows on a one-way road: from the system to the experimenter. An endophysical perception can be realized when the experimenter is part of the system under observation. In such a case one has a two-way informational flow; measurements and entities measured are interchangeable and any attempt to distinguish between them ends up as a convention. The general conception dominating the sciences is that the physical universe is perceivable ...

Quantum information processing is at the crossroads of physics, mathematics and computer science. It is concerned with that we can and cannot do with quantum information that goes beyond the abilities of classical information processing devices. Communication complexity is an area of classical computer science that aims at quantifying the amount of communication necessary to solve distributed computational problems. Quantum communication complexity uses quantum mechanics to reduce the amount of communication that would be classically required. Pseudo-telepathy is a surprising application of quantum information processing to communication complexity. Thanks to entanglement, perhaps the most nonclassical manifestation of quantum mechanics, two or more quantum players can accomplish a distributed task with no need for communication whatsoever, which would be an impossible feat for classical players. After a detailed overview of the principle and purpose of pseudo-telepathy, we present a survey of recent and no-so-recent work on the subject. In particular, we describe and analyse all the pseudo-telepathy games currently known to the authors.

This article presents a general discussion of several aspects of our present understanding of quantum mechanics. The emphasis is put on the very special correlations that this theory makes possible: they are forbidden by very general arguments based on realism and local causality. In fact, these correlations are completely impossible in any circumstance, except the very special situations designed by physicists especially to observe these purely quantum effects. Another general point that is emphasized is the necessity for the theory to predict the emergence of a single result in a single realization of an experiment. For this purpose, orthodox quantum mechanics introduces a special postulate: the reduction of the state vector, which comes in addition to the Schrödinger evolution postulate. Nevertheless, the presence in parallel of two evolution processes of the same object (the state vector) may be a potential source for conflicts; various attitudes that are possible

This paper is a commentary on the foundational significance of the Clifton-Bub-Halvorson theorem characterizing quantum theory in terms of three information-theoretic constraints. I argue that: (1) a quantum theory is best understood as a theory about the possibilities and impossibilities of information transfer, as opposed to a theory about the mechanics of nonclassical waves or particles, (2) given the information-theoretic constraints, any mechanical theory of quantum phenomena that includes an account of the measuring instruments that reveal these phenomena must be empirically equivalent to a quantum theory, and (3) assuming the information-theoretic constraints are in fact satisfied in our world, no mechanical theory of quantum phenomena that includes an account of measurement interactions can be acceptable, and the appropriate aim of physics at the fundamental level then becomes the representation and manipulation of information.

The paper explores the basic geometrical properties of the observables characterizing two-qubit systems by employing a novel projective ring geometric approach. After introducing the basic facts about quantum complementarity and maximal quantum entanglement in such systems, we demonstrate that the 15×15 multiplication table of the associated four-dimensional matrices exhibits a so-far-unnoticed geometrical structure that can be regarded as three pencils of lines in the projective plane of order two. All lines in each pencil carry mutually commuting operators; in one of the pencils, which we call the kernel, the observables on two lines share a base of maximally entangled states. The three operators on any line in each pencil represent a row or column of some Mermin’s “magic ” square, thus revealing an inherent geometrical nature of the latter. In the complement of the kernel, the eight vertices/observables are joined by twelve lines which form the edges of a cube. A substantial part of the paper is devoted to showing that the nature of this geometry has much to do with the structure of the projective lines defined over the rings that are the direct product of n copies of the Galois field GF(2), with n = 2, 3 and 4.

The paper deals with the projective line over the finite factor ring R ♣ ≡ GF(2)[x]/〈x 3 −x〉. The line is endowed with 18 points, spanning the neighbourhoods of three pairwise distant points. As R ♣ is not a local ring, the neighbour (or parallel) relation is not an equivalence relation so that the sets of neighbour points to two distant points overlap. There are nine neighbour points to any point of the line, forming three disjoint families under the reduction modulo either of two maximal ideals of the ring. Two of the families contain four points each and they swap their roles when switching from one ideal to the other; the points of the one family merge with (the image of) the point in question, while the points of the other family go in pairs into the remaining two points of the associated ordinary projective line of order two. The single point of the remaining family is sent to the reference point under both the mappings and its existence stems from a non-trivial character of the Jacobson radical, J♣, of the ring. The factor ring ˜ R ♣ ≡ R♣/J♣ is isomorphic to GF(2) ⊗ GF(2). The projective line over ˜ R ♣ features nine points, each of them being surrounded by four neighbour and the same number of distant points, and any two distant points share two neighbours. These remarkable ring geometries are surmised to be of relevance for modelling entangled qubit states, to be discussed in detail in Part II of the paper.