Quantum nonlocality without entanglement: explicit dependence on prior probabilities of nonorthogonal mirror-symmetric states

Abstract

In the case of a multi-party system, through local operations and classical communication (LOCC), each party may not perform perfect discrimination of quantum states that are separable and orthogonal. This property of quantum ensemble is called “nonlocality without entanglement” since each local party has a limit to full information of given quantum states. When this property is extended to the case of minimum-error discrimination, one can see that it is revealed when a nonlocal measurement provides more information about the unentangled states than LOCC does. One may infer the fact that the property depends on quantum states composing the quantum ensemble. However, an essential but unsettled question about the property is whether an explicit dependence on prior probabilities in terms of minimum-error discrimination could be shown in nonlocality without entanglement. In a simple term, one can ask whether different quantum ensembles made of the same separable quantum states could exhibit explicitly different behavior of the nonlocality. We answer this question in the positive, and we furthermore provide the explicit functional dependence of guessing probability on prior probabilities for the mirror-symmetric ensemble. © 2021, The Author(s).