Nonlocality of a type of multi-star-shaped quantum networks

Abstract The correlations in quantum networks have attracted strong interest due to the fact that linear Bell inequalities derived from one source are useless for characterizing multipartite correlations of general quantum networks. In this paper, a type of multi-star-shaped quantum networks are introduced and discussed. Such a network consists of three-grade nodes: the first grade is named party (node) A , the second one consists of m nodes marked B 1 , B 2 , …, B m , which are stars of A and the third one consists of m 2 nodes C k j ( j , k = 1 , 2 , … , m ) , where C k j ( k = 1 , 2 , … , m ) are stars of B j . We call such a network a three-grade m -star quantum network and denoted by SQN (3, m ), being as a natural extension of bilocal networks and star-shaped networks. We introduce and discussed the locality and strong locality of a SQN (3, m ) and derive the related nonlinear Bell inequalities, called (3, m )-locality inequalities and (3, m )-strong locality inequalities. To compare with the bipartite locality of quantum states, we define the separability of SQN (3, m ) that imply the locality and then locality of SQN (3, m ). When all of the shared states of the network are pure ones, we prove that SQN (3, m ) is nonlocal if and only if it is entangled.