Sustained state-independent quantum contextual correlations from a single ion

Understand

We use a single trapped-ion qutrit to demonstrate the violation of an input-state-independent non-contextuality inequality using a sequence of randomly chosen quantum non-demolition projective measurements.

• We concatenate 54 million sequential measurements of 13 observables, and violate an optimal non-contextual bound by 214 standard deviations.
• We use the same dataset to characterize imperfections including signaling and repeatability of the measurements.
• The experimental sequence was generated in real time with a quantum random number generator integrated into our control system to select the subsequent observable with a latency below 50 {\mu}s, which can be used to constrain hidden-variable models that might describe our results.