Certified Private Relational Time from Entanglement

TL;DR

The paper introduces a quantum method to define time using entangled particles, showing that relational time can be certified as private and unpredictable.

Contribution

The novel contribution is the concept of 'Certified Private Time' derived from quantum entanglement and Bell tests.

Findings

Quantum predictions for coincidence tick rates exceed classical benchmarks by up to 13.6% at specific angles.

Relational time-stamp records can be certified as private and unpredictable using Bell tests.

Abstract

We introduce an “entangled clock” in which time is defined operationally by discrete measurement registrations on a singlet state. Locally, each party’s tick rate is fixed by the unbiased marginals. The nontrivial resource is the relational (coincidence-tick) stream: because the singlet’s information budget is entirely exhausted by joint properties, the only definite temporal structure resides in the correlations between the two parties. Operationally, after exchanging time tags and outcomes, Alice and Bob identify synchronized events (that is, the ++ channel) and thereby obtain a joint tick record. Comparing the ++ coincidence rate R(θ)=P++(a→,b→) to Peres’ isotropic bomb-fragment local-hidden-variable model (yielding Rcl(θ)=θ/(2π)), we find that for obtuse analyzer separations the quantum prediction exceeds this natural classical benchmark, with a maximal relative excess of about 13.6% near θ≈140.5∘. We emphasize that this “faster ticking” refers to the rate of identified coincidence ticks under a specific operational convention, not to an improved local clock rate, precision, or stability. Finally, by using multiple settings and a Bell test, we outline “Certified Private Time”: a device-independent certification of unpredictability/privacy of the relational time-stamp record against adversaries lacking foreknowledge of the settings, analogous to certified randomness generation.

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