Direct Adaptive Certification of High-Dimensional Entanglement with Bell Tests

Abstract

Entangled photons play a crucial role in quantum applications, and determining and characterising their entanglement is vital to using them effectively. High-dimensional entangled states offer richer possibilities, but their additional measurement degrees of freedom make them increasingly demanding to characterise. However, adaptive Bell-test methods based on complex simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (CSPSA) have so far focused mainly on qubits. Here we numerically investigate a Bell-inequality-violation-based method for detecting entanglement in unknown quantum states. We extend CSPSA to high-dimensional Bell testing by using the Collins-Gisin-Linden-Massar-Popescu (CGLMP) inequality for bipartite qudits. The resulting protocol can detect Bell-nonlocal correlations in unknown entangled states, whether pure or mixed, without first reconstructing their density matrix. Using 100 optimisation iterations in each of 100 independent finite-shot runs per number of dimensions d, we demonstrate certified CGLMP violations throughout d=2-8. For isotropic mixed states tested at a visibility of just 0.05 above the standard-Fourier violation threshold, we likewise observe confidence-certified CGLMP violations throughout the range of d studied. We compare this direct stochastic approach with quantum state tomography, the standard method for characterising an unknown state. In the matched benchmark, CSPSA uses fewer measurement configurations per attempt from d=6, whereas tomography requires fewer detected pairs per certified result through d=8. We also derive the phase dependence of the CGLMP parameter and clarify the features of its landscape that govern the adaptive search. Because the measurement-setting cost of each CSPSA iteration is independent of dimension, the method offers a particularly attractive route to the certification of high-dimensional entanglement.