Nonclassicality as the failure of noncontextuality

Abstract

To make precise the sense in which nature fails to respect classical physics, one requires a formal notion of "classicality". Ideally, such a notion should be defined operationally, so that it can be subjected to a direct experimental test, and it should be applicable in a wide variety of experimental scenarios, so that it can cover the breadth of phenomena that are thought to defy classical understanding. Bell's notion of local causality fulfills the first criterion but not the second, because it is restricted to scenarios with two or more systems that are space-like separated. The notion of noncontextuality fufills the second criterion, because it is applicable to any experiment (even those on a single system), but it is a long-standing question whether it can be made to fulfill the first. Previous attempts to experimentally test noncontextuality have all presumed certain idealizations that do not hold in real experiments, namely, noiseless measurements and exact operational equivalences. In this talk, I will describe how one can devise experimental tests that are free of these idealizations using an operational notion of noncontextuality that applies to both preparations and measurements. These new theoretical insights raise the bar significantly for any claim of an experimental demonstration of nonclassicality. They also provide the means of determining, for any phenomenon that is typically thought to defy classical explanation, which experimentally-testable features of that phenomenon, if any, conflict with the assumption of a noncontextual model.