Theory-agnostic nonclassicality certification in an integrated photonic circuit
Abstract
Certifying nonclassicality without assuming any particular underlying physical theory constitutes both a foundational challenge and a requirement for device-independent protocols. Realizing such theory-independent certification in scalable architectures is essential for connecting fundamental tests with emerging quantum technologies. Integrated photonic circuits are a leading platform for scalable quantum information processing, motivating the development of rigorous methods to certify the nonclassical resources underpinning quantum advantage. In this paper, we report a theory-independent certification of generalized contextuality on a three-mode integrated photonic circuit. Our approach combines theory-agnostic tomography with simplex-embeddability certification---a framework that requires no assumptions about the underlying physical theory---and applies it to experimental data from a three-mode photonic circuit seeded by single photons. An independently constructed quantum model of the experiment provides a consistency check on the observed nonclassicality, without entering the certification as a theoretical assumption. The method rules out simplex-embeddability for our experimental data, providing robust, theory-independent evidence that our photonic circuit exhibits nonclassicality.
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BibTeX
@misc{rossi2026theoryagnostic,
title = {{Theory-agnostic nonclassicality certification in an integrated photonic circuit}},
author = {Vinicius P. Rossi and Emanuele Polino and Beatrice Polacchi and Valeria Cimini and David Schmid and John H. Selby and Giacomo Corrielli and Andrea Crespi and Roberto Osellame and Fabio Sciarrino and Ana Belén Sainz},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.18671},
eprint = {2609.18671},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18671},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Theory-agnostic nonclassicality certification in an integrated photonic circuit
AU - Vinicius P. Rossi
AU - Emanuele Polino
AU - Beatrice Polacchi
AU - Valeria Cimini
AU - David Schmid
AU - John H. Selby
AU - Giacomo Corrielli
AU - Andrea Crespi
AU - Roberto Osellame
AU - Fabio Sciarrino
AU - Ana Belén Sainz
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/16
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.18671
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18671
AB - Certifying nonclassicality without assuming any particular underlying physical theory constitutes both a foundational challenge and a requirement for device-independent protocols. Realizing such theory-independent certification in scalable architectures is essential for connecting fundamental tests with emerging quantum technologies. Integrated photonic circuits are a leading platform for scalable quantum information processing, motivating the development of rigorous methods to certify the nonclassical resources underpinning quantum advantage. In this paper, we report a theory-independent certification of generalized contextuality on a three-mode integrated photonic circuit. Our approach combines theory-agnostic tomography with simplex-embeddability certification---a framework that requires no assumptions about the underlying physical theory---and applies it to experimental data from a three-mode photonic circuit seeded by single photons. An independently constructed quantum model of the experiment provides a consistency check on the observed nonclassicality, without entering the certification as a theoretical assumption. The method rules out simplex-embeddability for our experimental data, providing robust, theory-independent evidence that our photonic circuit exhibits nonclassicality.
ER -