Geometric decompositions of Bell polytopes with practical applications

In the well-studied $(2,2,2)$ Bell experiment consisting of two parties, two measurement settings per party, and two possible outcomes per setting, it is known that if the experiment obeys no-signaling constraints, then the set of admissible experimental probability distributions is fully characterized as the convex hull of 24 distributions: eight Popescu–Rohrlich (PR) boxes and 16 local deterministic distributions. Furthermore, it turns out that in the $(2,2,2)$ case, any nonlocal nonsignaling distribution can always be uniquely expressed as a convex combination of exactly one PR box and (up to) eight local deterministic distributions. In this representation each PR box will always occur only with a fixed set of eight local deterministic distributions with which it is affiliated. In this paper, we derive multiple practical applications of this result: we demonstrate an analytical proof that the minimum detection efficiency for which nonlocality can be observed is $\eta >2/3$ even for theories constrained only by the no-signaling principle, and we develop new algorithms that speed the calculation of important statistical functions of Bell test data. Finally, we enumerate the vertices of the no-signaling polytope for the $(2,n,2)$ 'chained Bell' scenario and find that similar decomposition results are possible in this general case. Here, our results allow us to prove the optimality of a bound, derived in Barrett et al (2006 Phys. Rev. Lett. 97 170409), on the proportion of local theories in a local/nonlocal mixture that can be inferred from the experimental violation of a chained Bell inequality. (paper)