Quantum correlations are contextual yet, in general, nothing prevents the existence of even more contextual correlations. We identify and test a noncontextuality inequality in which the quantum violation cannot be improved by any hypothetical postquantum theory, and use it to experimentally obtain correlations in which the fraction of noncontextual correlations is less than 0.06. Our correlations are experimentally generated from the results of sequential compatible tests on a four-state quantum system encoded in the polarization and path of a single photon.

The Kochen-Specker (KS) theorem is a central result in quantum theory and has applications in quantum information. Its proof requires several yes-no tests that can be grouped in contexts or subsets of jointly measurable tests. Arguably, the best measure of simplicity of a KS set is the number of contexts. The smaller this number is, the smaller the number of experiments needed to reveal the conflict between quantum theory and noncontextual theories and to get a quantum vs classical outperformance. The original KS set had 132 contexts. Here we introduce a KS set with seven contexts and prove that this is the simplest KS set that admits a symmetric parity proof.

A fundamental problem is to understand why quantum theory only violates some noncontextuality (NC) inequalities and identify the physical principles that prevent higher-than-quantum violations. We prove that quantum theory only violates those NC inequalities whose exclusivity graphs contain, as induced subgraphs, odd cycles of length five or more, and/or their complements. In addition, we show that odd cycles are the exclusivity graphs of a well-known family of NC inequalities and that there is also a family of NC inequalities whose exclusivity graphs are the complements of odd cycles. We characterize the maximum noncontextual and quantum values of these inequalities, and provide evidence supporting the conjecture that the maximum quantum violation of these inequalities is exactly singled out by the exclusivity principle.

We show how to prepare any graph state of up to 12 qubits with (a) the minimum number of controlled-$Z$ gates and (b) the minimum preparation depth. We assume only one-qubit and controlled-$Z$ gates. The method exploits the fact that any graph state belongs to an equivalence class under local Clifford operations. We extend up to 12 qubits the classification of graph states according to their entanglement properties, and identify each class using only a reduced set of invariants. For any state, we provide a circuit with both properties (a) and (b), if it does exist, or, if it does not, one circuit with property (a) and one with property (b), including the explicit one-qubit gates needed.

An essential ingredient in many examples of the conflict between quantum theory and noncontextual hidden variables (e.g., the proof of the Kochen-Specker theorem and Hardy's proof of Bell's theorem) is a set of atomic propositions about the outcomes of ideal measurements such that, when outcome noncontextuality is assumed, if proposition $A$ is true, then, due to exclusiveness and completeness, a nonexclusive proposition $B$ ($C$) must be false (true). We call such a set a true-implies-false set (TIFS) [true-implies-true set (TITS)]. Here we identify all the minimal TIFSs and TITSs in every dimension $d\ge 3$, i.e., the sets of each type having the smallest number of propositions. These sets are important because each of them leads to a proof of impossibility of noncontextual hidden variables and corresponds to a simple situation with quantum vs classical advantage. Moreover, the methods developed to identify them may be helpful to solve some open problems regarding minimal Kochen-Specker sets.