From statistical proofs of the Kochen-Specker theorem to noise-robust noncontextuality inequalities

Abstract

The Kochen-Specker theorem rules out models of quantum theory wherein projective measurements are assigned outcomes deterministically and independently of context. This notion of noncontextuality is not applicable to experimental measurements because these are never free of noise and thus never truly projective. For nonprojective measurements, therefore, one must drop the requirement that an outcome is assigned deterministically in the model and merely require that it is assigned a distribution over outcomes in a manner that is context-independent. By demanding context-independence in the representation of preparations as well, one obtains a generalized principle of noncontextuality that also supports a quantum no-go theorem. Several recent works have shown how to derive inequalities on experimental data which, if violated, demonstrate the impossibility of finding a generalized-noncontextual model of this data. That is, these inequalities do not presume quantum theory and, in particular, they make sense without requiring an operational analogue of the quantum notion of projectiveness. We here describe a technique for deriving such inequalities starting from arbitrary proofs of the Kochen-Specker theorem. It extends significantly previous techniques that worked only for logical proofs, which are based on sets of projective measurements that fail to admit of any deterministic noncontextual assignment, to the case of statistical proofs, which are based on sets of projective measurements that do admit of some deterministic noncontextual assignments, but not enough to explain the quantum statistics.