On safe post-selection for Bell tests with ideal detectors: Causal diagram approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a causal diagram approach to ensure valid conclusions about Bell nonlocality from post-selected data, addressing concerns of selection bias in ideal detector scenarios.

Contribution

It presents the all-but-one principle, a criterion ensuring nonlocality claims remain valid despite post-selection, using causal inference tools.

Findings

The all-but-one principle guarantees valid Bell nonlocality conclusions with post-selection.

Causal diagram methods provide a systematic framework for analyzing post-selected Bell tests.

The approach applies to multipartite entanglement schemes with conserved particle numbers.

Abstract

Reasoning about Bell nonlocality from the correlations observed in post-selected data is always a matter of concern. This is because conditioning on the outcomes is a source of non-causal correlations, known as a selection bias, rising doubts whether the conclusion concerns the actual causal process or maybe it is just an effect of processing the data. Yet, even in the idealised case without detection inefficiencies, post-selection is an integral part of experimental designs, not least because it is a part of the entanglement generation process itself. In this paper we discuss a broad class of scenarios with post-selection on multiple spatially distributed outcomes. A simple criterion is worked out, called the all-but-one principle, showing when the conclusions about nonlocality from breaking Bell inequalities with post-selected data remain in force. Generality of this result, attained by adopting the high-level diagrammatic tools of causal inference, provides safe grounds for systematic reasoning based on the standard form of multipartite Bell inequalities in a wide array of entanglement generation schemes, without worrying about the dangers of selection bias. In particular, it can be applied to post-selection defined by single-particle events in each detection chanel when the number of particles in the system is conserved.