Self-testing multipartite entangled states through projections onto two systems

Abstract: Finding ways to test the behaviour of quantum devices is a timely enterprise, especially in the light of the rapid development of quantum technologies. Device-independent self-testing is one desirable approach, as it makes minimal assumptions on the devices being tested. In this work, we address the question of which states can be self-tested. This has been answered recently in the bipartite case [Nat. Comm. 8, 15485 (2017)], while it is largely unexplored in the multipartite case, with only a few scattered results, using a variety of different methods: maximal violation of a Bell inequality, numerical SWAP method, stabilizer self-testing etc. In this work, we investigate a simple, and potentially unifying, approach: combining projections onto two-qubit spaces (projecting parties or degrees of freedom) and then using maximal violation of the tilted CHSH inequalities. This allows to obtain self-testing of Dicke states and partially entangled GHZ states with two measurements per party, and also to recover self-testing of graph states (previously known only through stabilizer methods). Finally, we give the first self-test of a class multipartite qudit states: we generalize the self-testing of partially entangled GHZ states by adapting techniques from [Nat. Comm. 8, 15485 (2017)], and show that all multipartite states which admit a Schmidt decomposition can be self-tested with few measurements.