No abstract

Simply and reliably detecting and quantifying entanglement outside laboratory conditions will be essential for future quantum information technologies. Here we address this issue by proposing a method for generating expressions which can perform this task between two parties who do not share a common reference frame. These reference-frame-independent expressions require only simple local measurements, which allows us to experimentally test them using an off-the-shelf entangled photon source. We show that the values of these expressions provide bounds on the concurrence of the state and demonstrate experimentally that these bounds are more reliable than values obtained from state tomography since characterizing experimental errors is easier in our setting. Furthermore, we apply this idea to other quantities, such as the Renyi and von Neumann entropies, which are also more reliably calculated directly from the raw data than from a tomographically reconstructed state. This highlights the relevance of our approach for practical quantum information applications that require entanglement.

The detection of nonlocal correlations in a Bell experiment implies almost by definition some intrinsic randomness in the measurement outcomes. For given correlations, or for a given Bell violation, the amount of randomness predicted by quantum physics, quantified by the guessing probability, can generally be bounded numerically. However, currently only a few exact analytic solutions are known for violations of the bipartite Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt Bell inequality. Here, we study the randomness in a Bell experiment where three parties test the tripartite Mermin-Bell inequality. We give tight upper bounds on the guessing probabilities associated with one and two of the parties' measurement outcomes as a function of the Mermin inequality violation. Finally, we discuss the possibility of device-independent secret sharing based on the Mermin inequality and argue that the idea seems unlikely to work.