1 The statistical strength of nonlocality proofs Wim van Dam, Richard D. Gill, Peter D. Gr¨unwald, Abstract There exist numerous proofs of Bell’s theorem, stating that quantum mechanics is incompatible with local realistic theories of nature. Here we define the strength of such nonlocality proofs in terms of the amount of evidence against local realism provided by the corresponding experiments. This measure tells us how many trials of the experiment we should perform in order to observe a substantial violation of local realism. Statistical considerations show that the amount of evidence should be measured by the Kullback-Leibler or relative entropy divergence between the probability distributions over the measurement outcomes that the respective theories predict. The statistical strength of a nonlocality proof is thus determined by the experimental implementation of it that maximizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence from experimental (quantum mechanical) truth to the set of all possible local theories. An implementation includes a specification with which probabilities the different measurement settings are sampled, and hence the maximization is done over all such setting distributions. We analyze two versions of Bell’s nonlocality proof (his original proof and an optimized version by Peres), and proofs by Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt, Hardy, Mermin, and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger. We find that the GHZ proof is at least four and a half times stronger than all other proofs, while of the two-party proofs, the one of CHSH is the strongest. Index Terms nonlocality, Bell’s theorem, quantum correlations, Kullback-Leibler divergence CONTENTS I Introduction 3 I-A OurGame ......................................... .......... 3 I-B Quantifying Statistical Strength - Past Approaches . .......................... 3 I-C Quantifying Statistical Strength - Our Approach. ......................... 3 I-D OurResults-Numerical ............................ ............... 4 I-E OurResults-Mathematical. ................. 4 I-F OrganizationofThisPaper .. .... ... .... .... .... .... ................. 4 II Formal Setup 4 II-A DistributionofSettings . ................... 4 II-B MeasurementOutcomes.... .... ... .... .... .... .... ................ 5 II-C Definition of a Nonlocality Proof and Corresponding NonlocalityExperiments . 5 II-D LocalRealistTheories ........................... ................. 5 III The Nonlocality Proofs 6 arXiv:quant-ph/0307125v2 1 Jun 2004 IV Kullback-Leibler Divergence and Statistical Strength 6 IV-A Kullback-LeiblerDivergence . .................... 6 IV-A.1 KL Divergence and Statistical Strength in Simple HypothesisTesting . 7 IV-A.2 KL Divergence and Statistical Strength in Composite HypothesisTesting . 7 IV-B FormalDefinition of Statistical Strength . ........................ 8 V The Results 8 Wim van Dam is with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Theoretical Physics, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, United States of America. Email: [email protected] Richard Gill is with the Mathematical Institute, University Utrecht, Budapestlaan 6, NL-3584 CD Utrecht, The Netherlands. He is also at EURANDOM, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected] Peter Gr¨unwald is with the CWI, P.O. Box 94079, NL-1090 GB, The Netherlands. He is also at EURANDOM, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected] arXiv:quant-ph/0307125 2 VI Interpretation and Discussion 9 VI-A Which nonlocality proof is strongest and what does it mean? ....................... 9 VI-A.1 Caveat: statistical strength is not the whole story . ....................... 9 VI-A.2 ComparingGHZandCHSH .. .... .... .... .... ... .... ......... 9 VI-A.3 Nonlocality‘withoutinequality’? . ................... 9 VI-B Is our definition of statistical strength the right one? ............................ 10 VI-B.1 Is Kullback-Leibler divergence justified? . ..................... 10 VI-B.2 Game-TheoreticJustification . ................ 10 VI-C RelatedWorkbyPeres ............................. ............... 10 VI-D FutureExtensionsandConjectures . ..................... 11 VII Mathematical and Computational Properties of Statistical Strength 11 VII-A BasicProperties ............................... ................. 12 VII-B Game-TheoreticConsiderations. ...................... 13 VII-B.1 Game-TheoreticDefinitions. ................ 13 VII-B.2 Game-Theoretic, Saddle Point Theorems. ................... 14 VII-C ComputingStatisticalStrength . ...................... 14 VIII Acknowledgments 15 References 15 Appendix I: Beyond 2 2 2: General Case of Nonlocality Proofs 16 × × Appendix II: The Nonlocality Arguments 16 II-A ArgumentsofBellandCHSH .... ... .... .... .... .... .. ............... 16 II-B Hardy’sArgument................................ ............... 16 II-C Mermin’sArgument............................... ............... 17 II-D GHZ’sArgument .................................. ............. 17 Appendix III: The Nonlocality Proofs, Their Optimal Setting Distributions and Best Classical Theories 17 III-A OriginalBell.................................. ................ 18 III-B OptimizedBell................................. ................ 18 III-C CHSH .......................................... ........... 18 III-D Hardy......................................... ............. 21 III-E Mermin........................................ ............. 21 III-F GHZ ........................................... ........... 21 Appendix IV: The Kullback-Leibler Divergence 24 IV-A Formal Connection between KL Divergence and StatisticalStrength.................... 24 IV-A.1 FrequentistJustification . ................ 25 IV-A.2 BayesianJustification . .............. 26 IV-A.3 Information-TheoreticJustification . .................... 26 IV-B Properties of Kullback-Leibler Divergence . ......................... 27 IV-B.1 GeneralProperties. .... ... .... .... .... .... ... ............. 27 IV-B.2 TheAdditivityProperty. .............. 27 IV-C Kullback-Leibler versus Total Variation Distance . ........................... 28 IV-D Intuitionbehinditall . .... .... ... .... .... .... ... .................. 28 IV-E BayesianAnalysis............................... ................ 29 IV-F InformationTheoreticAnalysis . ..................... 31 Appendix V: Proofs of Theorems 1,2 and 3 31 V-A Preparation..................................... .............. 31 V-B ProofofTheorem1................................. ............. 32 V-C ProofsofGame-TheoreticTheorems . ................... 34 V-C.1 Game-TheoreticPreliminaries. ................ 34 V-C.2 ProofofTheorem2............................... ......... 35 V-C.3 ProofofTheorem3............................... ......... 35 3 I. INTRODUCTION PLETHORA of proofs exist of Bell’s theorem (“quantum mechanics violates local realism”) encapsulated in inequalities A and equalities of which the most celebrated are those of Bell [5], Clauser, Horne, Shimony and Holt (CHSH) [9], Greenberger, Horne and Zeilinger (GHZ) [15], Hardy [20], and Mermin [25]. Competing claims exist that one proof is stronger than another. For instance, a proof in which quantum predictions having probabilities 0 or 1 only are involved, is often said to be more strong than a proof that involves quantum predictions of probabilities between 0 and 1. Other researchers argue that one should compare the absolute differences between the probabilities that quantum mechanics predicts and those that are allowed by local theories. And so on. The aim of this paper is to settle such questions once and for all: we formally define the strength of a nonlocality proof and show that our definition is the only one compatible with generally accepted notions in information theory and theoretical statistics. To see the connection with statistics, note first that a mathematical nonlocality proof shows that the predicted probabilities of quantum theory are incompatible with local realism. Such a proof can be implemented as an experimental proof showing that physical reality conforms to those predictions and hence too is incompatible with local realism. We are interested in the strength of such experimental proofs, which should be measured in statistical terms: how sure do we become that a certain theory is false, after observing a certain violation from that theory, in a certain number of experiments. A. Our Game We analyze the statistics of nonlocality proofs in terms of a two-player game. The two players are the pro-quantum theory experimenter QM, and a pro-local realism theoretician LR. The experimenter QM is armed with a specific proof of Bell’s theorem. A given proof—BELL, CHSH, HARDY, MERMIN, GHZ—involves a collection of equalities and inequalities between various experimentally accessible probabilities. The proof specifies a given quantum state (of a collection of entangled qubits, for instance) and experimental settings (orientations of polarization filters or Stern-Gerlach devices). All local realistic theories of LR will obey the (in)equalities, while the observations that QM will make when performing the experiment (assuming that quantum mechanics is true) will violate these (in)equalities. The experimenter QM still has a choice of the probabilities with which the different combinations of settings will be applied, in a long sequence of independent trials. In other words, he must still decide how to allocate his resources over the different combinations of settings. At the same time, the local realist can come up with all kinds of different local realistic theories, predicting different probabilities