Quantum nonlocality without entanglement and state discrimination measures

Shayeef Murshid1, Tathagata Gupta2, Vincent Russo3, and Somshubhro Bandyopadhyay4

1Electronics and Communication Sciences Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, 203 B. T. Road, Kolkata 700108, India
2Physics and Applied Mathematics Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, 203 B. T. Road, Kolkata 700108, India
3Unitary Foundation, 315 Montogomery St, Fl 10 San Francisco, California 94104, USA
4Department of Physical Sciences, Bose Institute, EN 80, Bidhannagar, Kolkata 700091, India

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Updated version: The authors have uploaded version v3 of this work to the arXiv which may contain updates or corrections not contained in the published version v2. The authors left the following comment on the arXiv:
v3 - updated abstract

Abstract

An ensemble of product states is said to exhibit “quantum nonlocality without entanglement” if it cannot be optimally discriminated using local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We show that this property can depend on the chosen discrimination measure. Specifically, we construct a family of ensembles, each consisting of six linearly independent, equally probable bipartite product states, for which LOCC fails to achieve optimal minimum-error discrimination but succeeds in achieving optimal unambiguous discrimination. We further extend our construction to multipartite systems and provide strong numerical evidence that a similar separation between local and global optima is present for minimum-error discrimination, but not for unambiguous discrimination.

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Cited by

[1] Jia-Xin Ma, Chen-Ming Bai, Su-Juan Zhang, and Lu Liu, "Genuine Activation of Hidden Nonlocality in Multipartite Quantum Systems", International Journal of Theoretical Physics 65 6, 155 (2026).

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