When Quantum Nonlocality Does Not Play Dice

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that certain quantum correlations can maximally violate Bell inequalities without certifying randomness, revealing fundamental limits of nonlocality and randomness in quantum theory.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic construction of Bell inequalities that do not certify randomness despite maximal violation, and characterizes the limits of determinism in quantum nonlocal correlations.

Findings

Existence of Bell inequalities maximally violated by quantum correlations but not certifying randomness.

Construction of quantum correlations deterministic for all fixed inputs, yet nonlocal.

Quantum correlations cannot be fully deterministic once inputs are known, unlike no-signalling theories.

Abstract

Bell inequality violations are often taken as evidence that quantum nonlocality guarantees intrinsic randomness, effectively playing the role of a "dice" at the heart of many device-independent cryptographic protocols. We show that there exist nontrivial Bell inequalities that are maximally violated by quantum correlations yet fail to certify randomness for any fixed input pair, rendering them useless for a large class of standard device-independent schemes. This is achieved through a systematic construction based on symmetric deterministic extensions of nonlocal games. We further construct maximally nonlocal quantum correlations that are deterministic for every fixed input pair, in the sense that for any chosen inputs they admit a convex decomposition into strategies with fixed outputs for those inputs. In the no-signalling framework, this property corresponds to the "bound randomness" of [Ac\'in et al., PRA 93, 012319 (2016)], where an adversary-once learning the inputs-can steer the correlations into a decomposition that makes the outputs fully predictable, thereby making them useless in most existing device-independent protocols. In contrast, bound randomness is impossible in quantum theory: any quantum correlations that become deterministic once the inputs are revealed must in fact be local. Our results pinpoint the precise limits of determinism compatible with quantum nonlocality.