Victoria Wright

The fact that quantum theory radically departs from 'classical lines of thought' is a critical driver for its applications in quantum information and computation. A famous example of this radical departure—this nonclassicality—is entanglement. Bell's theorem shows that shared entanglement can be used to generate correlations between non-communicating parties in ways that are impossible to do without communication if one only had access to classical shared randomness. In their very formulation, both entanglement and Bell's theorem are composite notions of nonclassicality, i.e., they require at least two parties to be meaningful. Another key notion of nonclassicality is contextuality that follows from the Kochen-Specker theorem: this notion is applicable to single systems. I will present some recent results on the interplay between contextuality and entanglement in composite systems and their consequences for our understanding of restricted models of multiqubit quantum computation with state injection that have been previously proposed. Based on V.J. Wright and R. Kunjwal, Quantum 7, 900 (2023).

Performing a measurement on one half of an entangled pair of systems remotely prepares the other half in an ensemble of quantum states. Now consider any set of ensembles that mix to the same density operator. The Schrödinger--HJW theorem states that one can remotely prepare any chosen ensemble from this set by a choice of measurement performed on one half of a fixed entangled state. We generalise this result to show that any set of ensembles can be remotely prepared if one is allowed to post-select on the outcome of the preparing measurement. The probability that the remote preparation is successful is then lower bounded in terms of the distance between the ensembles. In a prepare-and-measure quantum key distribution protocol the distance between the ensembles represents the amount of information that is leaked about the choice of ensemble, e.g. the choice of basis in the BB84 protocol. Using our generalised result, we can prove the security of such protocols from only the fundamental assumption of how much information is leaked about the choice of ensemble/basis, i.e. from bounded basis-dependency.