A central result in the foundations of quantum mechanics is the Kochen-Specker theorem. In short, it states that quantum mechanics is in conflict with classical models in which the result of a measurement does not depend on which other compatible measurements are jointly performed. Here compatible measurements are those that can be implemented simultaneously or, more generally, those that are jointly measurable. This conflict is generically called quantum contextuality. In this review, an introduction to this subject and its current status is presented. Several proofs of the Kochen-Specker theorem and different notions of contextuality are reviewed. How to experimentally test some of these notions is explained, and connections between contextuality and nonlocality or graph theory are discussed. Finally, some applications of contextuality in quantum information processing are reviewed.

Quantum steering refers to the possibility for Alice to remotely steer Bob’s state by performing local measurements on her half of a bipartite system. Two necessary ingredients for steering are entanglement and incompatibility of Alice’s measurements. In particular, it is known that for the case of pure states of maximal Schmidt rank the problem of steerability for Bob’s assemblage is equivalent to the problem of joint measurability for Alice’s observables. We show that such an equivalence holds in general; namely, the steerability of any assemblage can always be formulated as a joint measurability problem, and vice versa. We use this connection to introduce steering inequalities from joint measurability criteria and develop quantifiers for the incompatibility of measurements.

The problem of separating classical from quantum correlations is, in general, intractable and has been solved explicitly only in a few cases. In particular, known methods cannot provide general solutions for an arbitrary number of settings. We provide the complete characterization of the classical correlations and the corresponding maximal quantum violations for the case of $n\ge 4$ observables $X_0,...,X_{n-1}$, where each consecutive pair $\{X_i,X_{i+1}\}$, sum $\mathrm{mod}n$, is jointly measurable. This generalizes both the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt and the Klyachko-Can-Binicioğlu-Shumovsky scenarios, which are the simplest ones for locality and noncontextuality, respectively. In addition, we provide explicit quantum states and settings with maximal quantum violation and minimal quantum dimension.

We show that the quantum bound for temporal correlations in a Leggett-Garg test, analogous to the Tsirelson bound for spatial correlations in a Bell test, strongly depends on the number of levels $N$ that can be accessed by the measurement apparatus via projective measurements. We provide exact bounds for small $N$ that exceed the known bound for the Leggett-Garg inequality, and we show that in the limit $N$\rightarrow${}$\infty${}$ the Leggett-Garg inequality can be violated up to its algebraic maximum.

We introduce the concept of assemblage moment matrices, i.e., a collection of matrices of expectation values, each associated with a conditional quantum state obtained in a steering experiment. We demonstrate how it can be used for quantum states and measurements characterization in a device-independent manner, i.e., without invoking any assumption about the measurement or the preparation device. Specifically, we show how the method can be used to lower bound the steerability of an underlying quantum state directly from the observed correlation between measurement outcomes. Combining such device-independent quantifications with earlier results established by Piani and Watrous [Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 060404 (2015)], our approach immediately provides a device-independent lower bound on the generalized robustness of entanglement, as well as the usefulness of the underlying quantum state for a type of subchannel discrimination problem. In addition, by proving a quantitative relationship between steering robustness and the recently introduced incompatibility robustness, our approach also allows for a device-independent quantification of the incompatibility between various measurements performed in a Bell-type experiment. Explicit examples where such bounds provide a kind of self-testing of the performed measurements are provided.

Sequential measurements on a single particle play an important role in fundamental tests of quantum mechanics. We provide a general method to analyze temporal quantum correlations, which allows us to compute the maximal correlations for sequential measurements in quantum mechanics. As an application, we present the full characterization of temporal correlations in the simplest Leggett-Garg scenario and in the sequential measurement scenario associated with the most fundamental proof of the Kochen-Specker theorem.