Contextuality and the Single-Qubit Stabilizer Subtheory

Contextuality is a fundamental nonclassical property of quantum theory, which has recently been proven to be a key resource for achieving quantum speed-ups in some leading models of quantum computation. However, which of the forms of contextuality, and how much thereof, are required to obtain a speed-up in an arbitrary model of quantum computation remains unclear. In this Letter, we show that the relation between contextuality and a computational advantage is more complicated than previously thought. We achieve this by proving that generalized contextuality is present even within the simplest subset of quantum operations, the so-called single-qubit stabilizer theory, which offers no computational advantage and was previously believed to be completely noncontextual. However, the contextuality of the single-qubit stabilizer theory can be confined to transformations. Therefore, our result also demonstrates that the commonly considered prepare-and-measure scenarios (which ignore transformations) do not fully capture the contextuality of quantum theory.

Figure 1

A graphical representation of the ontic space $\mathrm{\Lambda }$ of the 8-state model, where the tuples $(x,y,z)$ index ontic states. The green and blue tetrahedra are the simplices of the odd- and even-parity ontic states, respectively. The stabilizer polytope is the octahedron defined by the intersection of the two tetrahedra. The transformation ${\mathrm{\Gamma }}_{{\mathcal{T}}_1}$ from Eq. (6) maps any ontic state in one of the tetrahedra to another ontic state in the same tetrahedra, while the operationally equivalent transformation ${\mathrm{\Gamma }}_{{\mathcal{T}}_2}$ from Eq. (7) maps any ontic state to an ontic state in the opposite tetrahedra.