Self-testing represents the strongest form of certification of a quantum system. Here we investigate theoretically and experimentally the question of self-testing non-projective quantum measurements. That is, how can one certify, from observed data only, that an uncharacterised measurement device implements a desired non-projective positive-operator-valued-measure (POVM). We consider a prepare-and-measure scenario with a bound on the Hilbert space dimension, which we argue is natural for this problem since any measurement can be made projective by artificially increasing the Hilbert space dimension. We develop methods for (i) robustly self-testing extremal qubit POVMs (which feature either three or four outcomes), and (ii) certify that an uncharacterised qubit measurement is non-projective, or even a genuine four-outcome POVM. Our methods are robust to noise and thus applicable in practice, as we demonstrate in a photonic experiment. Specifically, we show that our experimental data implies that the implemented measurements are very close to certain ideal three and four outcome qubit POVMs, and hence non-projective. In the latter case, the data certifies a genuine four-outcome qubit POVM. Our results open interesting perspective for strong "black-box" certification of quantum devices.
Quantum information science breaks limitations of conventional information transfer, cryptography and computation by using quantum superpositions or entanglement as resources for information processing. Here we report on the experimental realisation of three-party quantum communication protocols using single three-level quantum system (qutrit) communication: secret-sharing, detectable Byzantine agreement and communication complexity reduction for a three-valued function. We have implemented these three schemes using the same optical fibre interferometric setup. Our realisation is easily scalable without compromising on detection efficiency or generating extremely complex many-particle entangled states.
Minimal informationally complete positive operator-valued measures (MIC-POVMs) are special kinds of measurement in quantum theory in which the statistics of their
d
2
-outcomes are enough to reconstruct any
d
-dimensional quantum state. For this reason, MIC-POVMs are referred to as standard measurements for quantum information. Here, we report an experiment with entangled photon pairs that certifies, for what we believe is the first time, a MIC-POVM for qubits following a device-independent protocol (i.e., modeling the state preparation and the measurement devices as black boxes, and using only the statistics of the inputs and outputs). Our certification is achieved under the assumption of freedom of choice, no communication, and fair sampling.
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