Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

The device-independent approach is one where conclusions about, say, physical systems (and hence of Nature) are drawn directly and solely from the observed correlations between measurement outcomes. This operational approach to physics arose as a byproduct of Bell’s seminal work to distinguish, via a Bell test, quantum correlations from the set of correlations allowed by local-hidden-variable theories. In practice, since one can only perform a finite number of experimental trials, deciding whether an empirical observation is compatible with some class of physical theories will have to be carried out via the task of hypothesis testing. In this talk, I explain how that the prediction-based-ratio method—initially developed for performing a hypothesis test of local-hidden-variable theories—can equally well be applied to test many other classes of physical theories, such as those constrained only by the nonsignaling principle, and subsets of which that are amenable to semidefinite programming characterization. Then, I explain how this can be straightforwardly extended to perform device-independent certification of certain desired properties of physical systems.