Beyond real: Investigating the role of complex numbers in self-testing

TL;DR

This paper explores complex self-testing in quantum strategies, extending standard results to the complex domain, and introduces a quaternion-based strategy for genuinely complex self-testing.

Contribution

It provides an operator-algebraic characterization of complex self-testing and constructs the first standard self-test for genuinely complex strategies.

Findings

Many structural results from standard self-testing extend to the complex setting.

Complex self-testing is characterized by the uniqueness of real parts of higher moments.

A quaternion-based strategy establishes the first standard self-test for genuinely complex strategies.

Abstract

We investigate complex self-testing, a generalization of standard self-testing that accounts for quantum strategies whose statistics is indistinguishable from their complex conjugate's. We show that many structural results from standard self-testing extend to the complex setting, including lifting of common assumptions. Our main result is an operator-algebraic characterization: complex self-testing is equivalent to uniqueness of the real parts of higher moments, leading to a basis-independent formulation in terms of real C* algebras. This leads to a classification of non-local strategies, and a tight boundary where standard self-testing does not apply and complex self-testing is necessary. We further construct a strategy involving quaternions, establishing the first standard self-test for genuinely complex strategy. Our work clarifies the structure of complex self-testing and highlights the subtle role of complex numbers in bipartite Bell non-locality.