Bounding the plausibility of physical theories in a device-independent setting via hypothesis testing

Understand

The device-independent approach to physics is one where conclusions about physical systems (and hence of Nature) are drawn directly and solely from the observed correlations between measurement outcomes.

• This operational approach to physics arose as a byproduct of Bell's seminal work to distinguish, via a Bell test, quantum correlations from the set of correlations allowed by local-hidden-variable theories.
• In practice, since one can only perform a finite number of experimental trials, deciding whether an empirical observation is compatible with some class of physical theories will have to be carried out via the task of hypothesis testing.
• In this paper, we show that the prediction-based-ratio method---initially developed for performing a hypothesis test of local-hidden-variable theories---can equally well be applied to test many other classes of physical theories, such as those constrained only by the nonsignaling principle, and those that are constrained to produce any of the outer approximation to the quantum set of correlations due to Navascu\'es-Pironio-Ac\'{\i}n.