Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Information causality (IC), a generalization of the no-signalling principle, states that communicating m classical bits cannot give the receiver access to more than m bits of information about the sender's independent data. Although IC holds in quantum theory and excludes a broad class of supra-quantum correlations, its validity for the almost-quantum set has remained open. This semidefinite relaxation of the quantum set satisfies nontrivial communication complexity, no advantage for non-local computation, macroscopic locality, local orthogonality, and numerical evidence has suggested that it may also satisfy IC. Here we show that almost-quantum correlations violate IC, and do so without bound. Unlike earlier violations of IC, which rely on biased guesses, ours is driven by zero-error certificates: each is rare but never wrong, carries information linear in its probability, and vouches for many of the sender's bits at once. Our result establishes a sharp dichotomy: either IC is a valid physical principle that excludes these correlations, or any nonsignalling theory realizing them admits no mutual information obeying consistency, data processing and the chain rule. In the latter case, we discuss why the chain rule is the natural property to relinquish, and how this possibility relates to histories-based formulations and to locality defined relative to the state rather than presupposed in a fixed spacetime.
Source: Research Square
Authors: Anandamay Das Bhowmik, Manik Banik
Institution: S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences
Language: English
Subfield: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225082912