Bell correlations depth in many-body systems

TL;DR

This paper develops new Bell inequalities suitable for many-body quantum systems, enabling the detection and quantification of genuine nonlocal correlations with collective measurements, demonstrated with experiments on 480 atoms.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for two-body Bell inequalities that reveal the depth of Bell correlations in large systems using only two collective measurements.

Findings

Bell correlation depth up to 6 demonstrated in experiments with 480 atoms.

New Bell witnesses can detect genuine nonlocality with minimal measurement settings.

Framework applicable to arbitrary large systems with practical experimental implementation.

Abstract

While the interest in multipartite nonlocality has grown in recent years, its existence in large quantum systems is difficult to confirm experimentally. This is mostly due to the inadequacy of standard multipartite Bell inequalities to many-body systems: such inequalities usually rely on expectation values involving many parties and require an individual addressing of each party. In a recent work [J. Tura et al. Science 344, 6189 (2014)] some of us proposed simpler Bell inequalities overcoming such difficulties, opening the way for the detection of Bell correlations with trusted collective measurements through Bell correlation witnesses [R. Schmied et al. Science 352, 441 (2016)], hence demonstrating the presence of Bell correlations with assumptions on the statistics. Here, we address the question of assessing the number of particles sharing genuinely nonlocal correlations in a multipartite system. This endeavour is a priori challenging, as known Bell inequalities for genuine nonlocality suffer from the above shortcomings, plus a number of measurement settings scaling exponentially with the system size. We first show that most of these constraints drop once the witnesses corresponding to these inequalities are expressed: in systems where multipartite expectation values can be evaluated, these witnesses can reveal genuine nonlocality for an arbitrary number of particles with just two collective measurements. We then introduce a general framework focused on two-body Bell-like inequalities. We show that they also provide information about the number of particles that are genuinely nonlocal. Then, we characterize all such inequalities for a finite system size. We provide witnesses of Bell correlation depth $k\leq6$ for any number of parties, within experimental reach. A violation for depth $6$ is achieved with existing data from an ensemble of 480 atoms.