Experimental investigation of partially entangled states for device-independent randomness generation and self-testing protocols

Abstract

Previous theoretical works showed that all pure two-qubit entangled states can generate one bit of local randomness and can be self-tested through the violation of proper Bell inequalities. We report an experiment in which nearly pure partially entangled states of photonic qubits are produced to investigate these tasks in a practical scenario. We show that small deviations from the ideal situation make low entangled states impractical to self-testing and randomness generation using the available techniques. Our results show that in practice lower entanglement implies lower randomness generation, recovering the intuition that maximally entangled states are better candidates for deviceindependent quantum information processing.