Bell-state measurements are essential ingredients in many protocols for quantum information processing, ranging from quantum teleportation and dense coding to entanglement distribution in quantum networks. Their power relies on the fact that they are measurements in an entangled basis of a two-particle system and that the used Bell-state basis can be generated from a single Bell state by local unitary transformations. How can these measurements be generalized to more particles? We develop a general framework for this state-to-measurement problem: We introduce a hierarchy of classes of measurement bases, distinguished by the local transformations the parties may use for their generation from a single state. This leads to a generalization of the concept of maximally entangleable (or weighted hypergraph) states and the identification of a novel maximally entangled basis of four qubits, being a candidate for data-hiding tasks or distillation protocols. Finally, we prove that not all forms of entanglement can be encoded in an entire measurement basis.
Determining whether a target unitary can be implemented within a prescribed quantum circuit architecture is a fundamental problem in quantum information, with direct implications for optimisation and compilation of quantum circuits, and hardware-efficient quantum computation. While existing synthesis and compilation methods are primarily constructive, they generally do not provide rigorous certificates that a unitary cannot be realised using given implementation resources. Here we introduce a general framework to define quantum circuit architecture witnesses, which certify the incompatibility of a unitary transformation with a specified quantum circuit architecture. We formulate the witness construction as a semidefinite program by maximising the fidelity between the Choi state of the target unitary and those of tested circuits. The resulting witnesses provide practical and quantitative certificates of incompatibility, implying lower bounds on implementation resources such as the gate count or circuit depth, and can also be used experimentally to benchmark quantum devices by certifying that an implemented unitary channel goes beyond the capabilities of a given circuit architecture. For Clifford unitaries, we exploit the stabiliser formalism to reduce the construction to linear programming, enabling both more efficient numerical certification for circuits containing on the order of seven two-qubit gates, and analytical witnesses for some families of architectures made of an arbitrary number of gates.
Multipartite Bell tests provide a correlation-only route to benchmarking quantum processors, but their application at large scales is hindered by the rapid decay of many-body correlators under noise and exponentially many terms in conventional Bell expressions. Here we address these scalability obstacles by introducing a finite-setting generalized Mermin family of state-tailored Bell inequalities with analytic certification bounds, in which the measurement-setting number $m$ provides an additional certification dimension complementary to the system size $n$. We show that, for the powers-of-two setting choices considered here, increasing $m$ leaves the ideal normalized multipartite quantum value unchanged while lowering the relevant classical bounds, thereby strengthening the Bell-violation ratios and yielding an improved noise-robustness scaling compared to the standard Mermin inequality. We test this construction experimentally on a programmable superconducting processor by preparing Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states of up to 80 qubits. Using randomized sampling for direct Bell-operator estimation, we observe Bell ratios that grow exponentially with system size, certify a nonlocality depth of 14, and show that increasing $m$ strengthens both the Bell ratio and depth certification. All results are obtained solely from measured correlators and analytical bounds, without readout correction, tomography, or model-based mitigation. Generalized Mermin inequalities therefore provide a sharper Bell benchmark for noisy large-scale GHZ states.
Jianbin Cai, Junxiang Huang, F. Otto et al.· 0 citations