Bell Inequalities for Smells

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new class of Bell inequalities based on outcome equality comparisons, applicable to scenarios like smells, and demonstrates their potential for revealing nonlocality and serving as witnesses in quantum systems.

Contribution

It defines and solves a new class of Bell inequalities based on outcome equality, including multipartite cases, and explores their quantum violations and applications as witnesses.

Findings

Thousands of new tight inequalities discovered.

Most inequalities admit quantum violations.

Inequalities can serve as dimension, outcome, and multipartite nonlocality witnesses.

Abstract

In this work, we study a particular class of Bell inequalities involving only direct equality-comparisons of outcomes. This arises naturally when outcomes are difficult to characterize. For instance, if measurements yield smells, it may be impractical to process them individually, while still being reasonable to judge whether two smells are identical or not. In the bipartite case, the scenario can be interpreted as a natural generalization of full-correlator inequalities (XOR games) beyond binary outputs. We define the sub-polytope of the local polytope corresponding to this scenario and solve it for several bipartite and multipartite scenarios by leveraging some structural properties. In doing so, we obtain thousands of new tight inequalities, many of which are also facets of the standard local polytope. We also define unanimous Bell inequalities, a particular case of the previous class applied to the multipartite setting in which only full-equality events (all outcomes equal) are considered. We show that such inequalities can always be written as deterministic nonlocal games, and we give a simple multipartite unanimous family and prove its local bound. We show that most of these inequalities admit quantum violations, and we also display aspects of their importance for nonlocality. For instance, we identify examples where such inequalities can act as dimension witnesses, outcome witnesses, witnesses of genuine multipartite nonlocality, as well as being relevant to CHSH. These results show that these simple and elegant inequalities by themselves provide a powerful tool for discovering new Bell inequalities and device-independent witnesses.