The idea of self-testing is to render guarantees concerning the inner workings of a device based on the measurement statistics. It is one of the most formidable quantum certification and benchmarking schemes. Recently it was shown by Coladangelo et. al. (Nat Commun 8, 15485 (2017)) that all pure bipartite entangled states can be self tested in the device independent scenario by employing subspace methods introduced by Yang et. al. (Phys. Rev. A 87, 050102(R)). Here, we have adapted their method to show that any bipartite pure entangled state can be certified in the semi-device independent scenario through Quantum Steering. Analogous to the tilted CHSH inequality, we use a steering inequality called Tilted Steering Inequality for certifying any pure two-qubit entangled state. Further, we use this inequality to certify any bipartite pure entangled state by certifying two-dimensional sub-spaces of the qudit state by observing the structure of the set of assemblages obtained on the trusted side after measurements are made on the un-trusted side. As a feature of quantum state certification via steering, we use the notion of Assemblage based robust state certification to provide robustness bounds for the certification result in the case of pure maximally entangled states of any local dimension.

Robust Semi-Device Independent Certification of All Pure Bipartite Maximally Entangled States via Quantum Steering

The study of quantum correlation sets initiated by Tsirelson in the 1980s and originally motivated by questions in the foundations of quantum mechanics has more recently been tied to questions in quantum cryptography, complexity theory, operator space theory, group theory, and more. Synchronous correlation sets introduced in [Paulsen et. al, JFA 2016] are a subclass of correlations that has proven particularly useful to study and arises naturally in applications. We show that any correlation that is almost synchronous, in a natural $\ell_1$ sense, arises from a state and measurement operators that are well-approximated by a convex combination of projective measurements on a maximally entangled state. This extends a result of [Paulsen et. al, JFA 2016] which applies to exactly synchronous correlations. Crucially, the quality of approximation is independent of the dimension of the Hilbert spaces or of the size of the correlation. Our result allows one to reduce the analysis of many classes of nonlocal games, including rigidity properties, to the case of strategies using maximally entangled states which are generally easier to manipulate.

Almost synchronous quantum correlations.

Self-testing results allow us to infer the underlying quantum mechanical description of states and measurements from classical outputs produced by non-communicating parties. The standard definition of self-testing does not apply in situations when there are two or more inequivalent optimal strategies. To address this, we introduce the notion of self-testing convex combinations of reference strategies, which is a generalisation of self-testing to multiple strategies. We show that the Glued Magic Square game [Quantum 4 (2020), p. 346] self-tests a convex combination of two inequivalent strategies. As a corollary, we obtain that the Glued Magic square game self-tests two EPR pairs thus answering an open question from [Quantum 4 (2020), p. 346]. Our self-test is robust and extends to natural generalisations of the Glued Magic Square game.

Glued magic games self-test maximally entangled states

Self-testing is a method to verify that one has a particular quantum state from purely classical statistics. For practical applications, such as device-independent delegated verifiable quantum computation, it is crucial that one self-tests multiple Bell states in parallel while keeping the quantum capabilities required of one side to a minimum. In this work we use the $3 \times n$ magic rectangle games (generalisations of the magic square game) to obtain a self-test for $n$ Bell states where the one side needs only to measure single-qubit Pauli observables. The protocol requires small input size (constant for Alice and $O(\log n)$ bits for Bob) and is robust with robustness $O(n^{5/2} \sqrt{\varepsilon})$, where $\varepsilon$ is the closeness of the observed correlations to the ideal. To achieve the desired self-test we introduce a one-side-local quantum strategy for the magic square game that wins with certainty, generalise this strategy to the family of $3 \times n$ magic rectangle games, and supplement these nonlocal games with extra check rounds (of single and pairs of observables).

Practical Parallel Self-testing of Bell States via Magic Rectangles.

In this thesis, we start with giving a mathematical description of bipartite quantum correlations and how they are built up in the Tensor model. This is needed because we want to recover the state and the operators when only the bipartite quantum correlation is known. In the literature, there are see-saw algorithms to recover the state, but they are limited to only lower dimensions. In this thesis, we explore an alternative approach, where we directly minimize the function f(ψ,{Esa},{Ftb}) = ∑a,b,s,t(P(a,b|s,t)- ψ*(Esa ⊗ Ftb)ψ)2. Here, P(a,b|s,t) is the bipartite correlation,  ψ is the state vector, and Esa and Ftb are the POVMs. Furthermore, ⊗ is the Kronecker product and * indicates the conjugate transpose of a vector. These variables are subject to constraints and some of them can easily be transformed into penalty functions. The matrices Esa and Ftb have to be Hermitian positive semidefinite, for which we parameterize them by their Cholesky decompositions. The gradient of this (now unconstrained) problem can be explicitly determined with the use of Wirtinger calculus. This offers an elegant way to determine the gradient of real-valued functions with complex variables. Also, a total description of Wirtinger calculus is also given, including a proof that the gradient indeed points towards the direction of the steepest incline. We use first-order methods like gradient descent with backtracking line search and momentum-based gradient descent to find a minimum solution of the equation. If the cost function converges towards zero, we assume that the variables converge to a correct state and measurement operators.  These methods can find large correlations of approximately 3000 separate variables in 1.5 hours and are able to find many different other correlations and states. The algorithm had some problems finding the operators and state of a family of correlations that had four inputs and two outputs. For some correlations, the algorithms found states and operators of lower dimension than the correlations were build with.

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First-order methods to recover the measurement operators and states of bipartite quantum correlations

We consider correlations, $p_{n,x}$, arising from measuring a maximally entangled state using $n$ measurements with two outcomes each, constructed from $n$ projections that add up to $xI$. We show that the correlations $p_{n,x}$ robustly self-test the underlying states and measurements. To achieve this, we lift the group-theoretic Gowers-Hatami based approach for proving robust self-tests to a more natural algebraic framework. A key step is to obtain an analogue of the Gowers-Hatami theorem allowing to perturb an "approximate" representation of the relevant algebra to an exact one. 
For $n=4$, the correlations $p_{n,x}$ self-test the maximally entangled state of every odd dimension as well as 2-outcome projective measurements of arbitrarily high rank. The only other family of constant-sized self-tests for strategies of unbounded dimension is due to Fu (QIP 2020) who presents such self-tests for an infinite family of maximally entangled states with even local dimension. Therefore, we are the first to exhibit a constant-sized self-test for measurements of unbounded dimension as well as all maximally entangled states with odd local dimension.

Christopher Schafhauser

Papers

Constant-sized robust self-tests for states and measurements of unbounded dimension