Beyond real: Investigating the role of complex numbers in self-testing

Abstract

We investigate complex self-testing, a generalization of standard self-testing that accounts for quantum strategies whose statistics is indistinguishable from their complex conjugate's. We show that many structural results from standard self-testing extend to the complex setting, including lifting of common assumptions. Our main result is an operator-algebraic characterization: complex self-testing is equivalent to uniqueness of the real parts of higher moments, leading to a basis-independent formulation in terms of real C* algebras. This leads to a classification of non-local strategies, and a tight boundary where standard self-testing does not apply and complex self-testing is necessary. We further construct a strategy involving quaternions, establishing the first standard self-test for genuinely complex strategy. Our work clarifies the structure of complex self-testing and highlights the subtle role of complex numbers in bipartite Bell non-locality.