Minimal state-dependent proof of measurement contextuality for a qubit

Abstract

We show that three unsharp binary qubit measurements are enough to violate a generalized noncontextuality inequality, the Liang-Spekkens-Wiseman inequality, in a state-dependent manner. For the case of trine spin axes we calculate the optimal quantum violation of this inequality. In addition, we show that unsharp qubit measurements do not allow a state-independent violation of this inequality. We thus provide a minimal state-dependent proof of measurement contextuality requiring one qubit and three unsharp measurements. Our result rules out generalized noncontextual models of these measurements which were previously conjectured to exist. More importantly, this class of generalized noncontextual models includes the traditional Kochen-Specker (KS) noncontextual models as a proper subset, so our result rules out a larger class of models than those ruled out by a violation of the corresponding KS inequality in this scenario. © 2014 American Physical Society.