Causal Compatibility Inequalities Admitting Quantum Violations in the Triangle Structure

TL;DR

This paper derives new causal compatibility inequalities for the Triangle structure that can be violated by quantum correlations, providing a device-independent way to certify nonclassical causal structures.

Contribution

The authors introduce novel inequalities for the Triangle causal structure that admit quantum violations, advancing the understanding of quantum correlations in causal models.

Findings

New inequalities admit quantum violations

Quantum correlations can violate classical causal constraints

Provides noise-robust witnesses of quantum nonclassicality

Abstract

It has long been recognized that certain quantum correlations are incompatible with particular assumption about classical causal structure. Given a causal structure of unknown classicality, the presence of such correlations certifies the nonclassical nature of the causal structure in a device-independent fashion. In structures where all parties share a common resource, these nonclassical correlations are also known as nonlocal correlations. Any constraint satisfied by all correlations which are classically compatible with a given causal structure defines a causal compatibility criterion. Such criteria were recently derived for the Triangle structure (E. Wolfe et al., arXiv:1609.00672) in the form of polynomial inequalities, begging the question of whether any of those inequalities admit violation by quantum correlations. Numerical investigation suggests that they do not, and we further conjecture that the set of correlations admitted by the classical Triangle structure is equivalent to the set of correlations admitted by its quantum generalization whenever the three observable variables are binary. Our main contribution in this work, however, is the derivation of new causal compatibility inequalities for the Triangle structure which do admit quantum violation. This provides a robust-to-noise witness of quantum correlations in the Triangle structure. We conclude by considering the possibility of quantum resources potentially qualitatively different from those known previously.