Science has recently published a study carried out by researchers at ICFO in collaboration with the Institute for Nuclear Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which demonstrates the capability of detecting non-locality in many-body quantum systems by constructing multipartite Bell inequalities involving only two-body correlations.

n Quantum Theory, interactions among particles create fascinating correlations that cannot be explained by any means known to the Classical World. These correlations, usually known to be nonlocal, prove that the Quantum and Classical Worlds differ at the level of elementary particles. They have also become a powerful resource over the years for such real-world applications as the generation of cryptographic keys, which are perfectly secure against any malicious adversary, or perfect random number generators, which are crucial for cryptography, the numerical simulations of complex systems or fair gambling. Last but not least, these nonlocal correlations, aside from entanglement, are expected to shed a completely new light on our understanding of the physics of many-body quantum states.

An important goal for researchers in this field has been to confirm that such nonlocal correlations really exist in Nature. To date, experiments have focussed on the observation of nonlocality in only small quantum systems consisting of few particles, leaving more complex quantum systems completely unstudied. This is simply because the known tools that may reveal nonlocality, the so-called Bell inequalities, involve correlations among many parties that are still out of reach of the current experimental technology dealing with many-body quantum systems.

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