Observation of stronger-than-binary correlations with entangled photonic qutrits

TL;DR

This paper reports the first experimental verification of quantum predictions showing stronger-than-binary correlations in entangled photonic qutrits, violating classical bounds with high statistical significance.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental evidence of stronger-than-binary correlations in photonic qutrits, confirming quantum predictions beyond classical explanations.

Findings

Violation of the optimal inequality by 9.3 standard deviations

Experimental demonstration of stronger-than-binary quantum correlations

Use of entangled photonic qutrits with randomly chosen three-outcome measurements

Abstract

We present the first experimental confirmation of the quantum-mechanical prediction of stronger-than-binary correlations. These are correlations that cannot be explained under the assumption that the occurrence of a particular outcome of an $n \ge 3$-outcome measurement is due to a two-step process in which, in the first step, some classical mechanism precludes $n-2$ of the outcomes and, in the second step, a binary measurement generates the outcome. Our experiment uses pairs of photonic qutrits distributed between two laboratories, where randomly chosen three-outcome measurements are performed. We report a violation by {9.3} standard deviations of the optimal inequality for nonsignaling binary correlations.