Experimentally ruling out joint reality based on operational completeness
Qiuxin Zhang, X. D. Yu, Xiaoting Gao, Chenhao Zhu, Yuxin Wang, Liangyu Ding, Xiang Zhang, Shuaining Zhang, Shuming Cheng, Michael J. W. Hall, Qiongyi He, Wei Zhang · Quantum Science and Technology · 2024
Abstract Whether the observables of a physical system admit real values is of fundamental importance to a deep understanding of nature. In this work, we report a device-independent experiment to confirm that the joint reality of two observables on a single two-level system is incompatible with the assumption of operational completeness, which is strictly weaker than that of preparation noncontextuality. We implement two observables on a trapped 171 Yb + ion to test this incompatibility via violation of certain inequalities derived from both linear and nonlinear criteria. Moreover, by introducing a highly controllable dephasing channel, we show that the nonlinear criterion is more robust against noise. Our results push the fundamental limit to delineate the quantum–classical boundary and pave the way for exploring relevant problems in other scenarios.