Contextuality under weak assumptions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework to analyze different noncontextuality assumptions in quantum theory, including possibilistic noncontextuality, and demonstrates their implications for foundational no-go theorems.

Contribution

It develops a new framework to distinguish between various noncontextuality assumptions and connects possibilistic noncontextuality to Hardy's notion, impacting quantum foundations.

Findings

Possibilistic noncontextuality is equivalent to Hardy's alternative notion.

Weaker noncontextuality assumptions suffice for versions of no-go theorems.

The framework clarifies relationships between operational and ontological models.

Abstract

The presence of contextuality in quantum theory was first highlighted by Bell, Kochen and Specker, who discovered that for quantum systems of three or more dimensions, measurements cannot be viewed as revealing pre-existing properties of the system. More precisely, no model can assign deterministic outcomes to the projectors of a quantum measurement in a way that depends only on the projector and not the context (the full set of projectors) in which it appeared, despite the fact that the Born rule probabilities associated with projectors are independent of the context. A more general, operational definition of contextuality introduced by Spekkens, which we will term "probabilistic contextuality", drops the assumption of determinism and allows for operations other than measurements to be considered contextual. Probabilistic noncontextuality represents the postulate that elements of an operational theory that cannot be distinguished from each other based on the statistics of arbitrarily many repeated experiments are ontologically identical. In this paper, we introduce a framework that enables us to distinguish between different noncontextuality assumptions in terms of the relationships between the ontological representations of objects in the theory given a certain relation between their operational representations. This framework can be used to motivate and define a "possibilistic" analogue, encapsulating the idea that elements of an operational theory that cannot be unambiguously distinguished operationally can also not be unambiguously distinguished ontologically. We then prove that possibilistic noncontextuality is equivalent to an alternative notion proposed by Hardy. Finally, we demonstrate that these weaker noncontextuality assumptions are sufficient to prove alternative versions of known "no-go" theorems that constrain $\psi$-epistemic models for quantum mechanics.