Quantum contextuality of complementary photon polarizations explored by adaptive input state control

Abstract

We experimentally investigate non-local contextual relations between complementary photon polarizations by adapting the entanglement and the local polarizations of a two-photon state to satisfy three deterministic conditions demonstrating both quantum contextuality and non-locality. The key component of this adaptive input state control is the variable degree of entanglement of the photon source. Local polarization rotations can optimize two of the three correlations, and the variation of the entanglement optimizes the third correlation. Our results demonstrate that quantum contextuality is based on a non-trivial trade-off between local complementarity and quantum correlations.