Temporal nonlocality of a qudit resides in the input state, not the channel, and certifies temporal teleportation up to a fundamental limit

Abstract

Correlations between two moments in time can be too strong for any classical explanation -- and, remarkably, this can happen for a single quantum system measured twice, with no second particle involved. We show that when one qudit is sent through a noisy channel, the strength of this "nonlocality in time" -- the temporal nonlocality robustness $\mathrm{TNR}$ -- is carried entirely by the starting state: it vanishes precisely when the input is maximally mixed (completely random), $\mathrm{TNR}(ρ_A,\mathcal{E})=0\Leftrightarrowρ_A=\mathbb{1}/d$, for the standard noise families. The resource is not any coherence in the channel but the back-action of the input's mixedness, and it survives even complete decoherence. This is at once a power and a trap. As a power, $\mathrm{TNR}$ device-independently lower-bounds the fidelity of temporal teleportation -- sending an unknown state forward in time -- reaching $7/9$ at $d=3$, without trusting the measuring devices. As a trap, because the certified quantity is decoupled from the channel's actual coherence transmission, it can certify more than the channel delivers: an injective (reversible) unitary attains the maximal temporal-Bell signal yet teleports below the classical baseline. We resolve this over-certification completely -- a universal cap $\mathrm{TNR}\le(d-1)/d$ with an exact channel-resolved value, honest certification for the depolarizing channel and for any sufficiently mixed probe, and a proof that no choice of probes makes it channel-universal. Underpinning the results is a unified semidefinite-programming hierarchy of the temporal entanglement, steering and nonlocality robustnesses ($\mathrm{TER}$, $\mathrm{TSR}$, $\mathrm{TNR}$), with a strict lower hierarchy and an upper one conditional on no-signaling in time ($\mathrm{NSIT}$). All structure is verified numerically for $d=2$ through $5$.