General Method for Classicality Certification in the Prepare and Measure Scenario

Abstract

Preparing and measuring physical systems are the operational building blocks of any physical experiment, and to describe them is the first purpose of any physical theory. Remarkably, even when only uncharacterized preparation and measurement devices are present, it is sometimes possible to distinguish between the behaviors of quantum and classical systems from only observational data. Certifying the physical origin of measurement statistics in the prepare and measure scenario is of primal importance for developing quantum networks, distributing quantum keys, and certifying randomness, to mention a few applications, but, surprisingly, no general methods to do so are known. We progress on this problem by crafting a general, sufficient condition to certify that a given set of preparations can only generate classical statistics, for any number of generalized measurements. As an application, we employ the method to demonstrate nonclassicality activation in the prepare and measure scenario, also considering its application in random access codes. Following that, we adapt our method to certify, again through a sufficient condition, whether a given set of measurements can never give rise to nonclassical behaviors, irrespective of what preparations they may act upon. This, in turn, allows us to find a large set of incompatible measurements that cannot be used to demonstrate nonclassicality, thus showing incompatibility is not sufficient for nonclassicality in the prepare and measure scenario.