Quantum networks reveal quantum nonlocality

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Date: 
2011-02-08
Author(s): 

Daniel Cavalcanti, Mafalda L. Almeida, Valerio Scarani and Antonio Acín

Reference: 

Nat. Commun. 2 , 184 (2011)
doi:10.1038/ncomms1193 (2011)

The results of local measurements on some composite quantum systems cannot be reproduced classically. This impossibility, known as quantum nonlocality, represents a milestone in the foundations of quantum theory. Quantum nonlocality is also a valuable resource for information-processing tasks, for example, quantum communication, quantum key distribution, quantum state estimation or randomness extraction. Still, deciding whether a quantum state is nonlocal remains a challenging problem. Here, we introduce a novel approach to this question: we study the nonlocal properties of quantum states when distributed and measured in networks. We show, using our framework, how any one-way entanglement distillable state leads to nonlocal correlations and prove that quantum nonlocality is a non-additive resource, which can be activated. There exist states, local at the single-copy level, that become nonlocal when taking several copies of them. Our results imply that the nonlocality of quantum states strongly depends on the measurement context.