Device-independent certification of degeneracy-breaking measurements

Abstract

In a device-independent Bell test, the devices are considered to be black boxes and the dimension of the system remains unspecified. The dichotomic observables involved in such a Bell test can be degenerate and one may invoke a suitable measurement scheme to lift the degeneracy. However, the standard Bell test cannot account for whether or up to what extent the degeneracy is lifted, as the effect of lifting the degeneracy can only be reflected in the postmeasurement states, which the standard Bell tests do not certify. In this work, we demonstrate the device-independent certification of degeneracy-breaking measurement based on the sequential Bell test by multiple observers who perform degeneracy-breaking unsharp measurements characterized by positive-operator-valued measures (POVMs)---the noisy variants of projectors. The optimal quantum violation of Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality by multiple sequential observers eventually enables us to certify up to what extent the degeneracy has been lifted. In particular, our protocol certifies the upper bound on the number of POVMs used for performing such measurements along with the entangled state and measurement observables. We use an elegant sum-of-squares approach that powers such certification of degeneracy-breaking measurements.