An analytical condition for the violation of Mermin's inequality by any three qubit state

Abstract: Mermin's inequality is the generalization of the Bell-CHSH inequality for three qubit states. The violation of the Mermin inequality guarantees the fact that there exists quantum non-locality either between two or three qubits in a three qubit system. In the absence of an analytical result to this effect, in order to check for the violation of Mermin's inequality one has to perform a numerical optimization procedure for even three qubit pure states. Here we derive an analytical formula for the maximum value of the expectation of the Mermin operator in terms of eigenvalues of symmetric matrices, that gives the maximal violation of the Mermin inequality for all three qubit pure and mixed states.