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: 8 Popescu-Rohrlich (PR) boxes and 16 local deterministic distributions. Here, we refine this result to show 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. This decomposition has multiple applications: we demonstrate an analytical proof that the minimum detection efficiency for which nonlocality can be observed is 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., PRL, 2006) on the proportion of local theories in a local/nonlocal mixture that can be inferred from the experimental violation of a chained Bell inequality.