Breakdown of Bell Factorization from Non-Injective Effective Descriptions

Violations of Bell inequalities are commonly interpreted as evidence for nonlocal influences or as constraints on realist descriptions. We show that the failure of Bell-type factorizability arises naturally when observable outcomes are obtained through a non-injective mapping from an underlying configuration space. In this setting, the standard factorization assumption can be viewed as an implicit requirement that observable variables admit a jointly factorizable completion at the underlying level. We demonstrate that this requirement need not hold when the mapping from underlying configurations to observables is many-to-one. The resulting breakdown of probabilistic factorization does not rely on superluminal dynamics or hidden causal influences, but follows from information loss under projection. Observable outcomes correspond to equivalence classes of underlying configurations, preventing the assignment of independent local variables. We illustrate this mechanism with an explicit toy model producing Bell–CHSH violations while preserving operational no-signalling and statistical independence of measurement settings. The model is not intended to reproduce quantum correlations quantitatively, and may exceed the Tsirelson bound; its role is to isolate the structural origin of the violation. This analysis does not contradict Bell’s theorem, but identifies a class of effective descriptions for which its factorizability assumption does not apply. The framework preserves locality at the underlying level, introduces no additional hidden-variable dynamics, and does not modify quantum mechanics. It clarifies how classical factorization is recovered in regimes where the effective mapping becomes approximately injective. In the operator language of quantum theory, the same mechanism admits a natural reformulation in terms of reduction to an effective observable subalgebra by a noncommutative conditional expectation.

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Journal
Quantum Reports
Published
2026-05-02
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/quantum8020044
Primary Topic
Quantum Mechanics and Applications
Type
article
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article

Breakdown of Bell Factorization from Non-Injective Effective Descriptions

Jérôme Beau
Quantum Reports
Quantum Mechanics and Applications
article

Breakdown of Bell Factorization from Non-Injective Effective Descriptions

Jérôme Beau
article en

Abstract

Violations of Bell inequalities are commonly interpreted as evidence for nonlocal influences or as constraints on realist descriptions. We show that the failure of Bell-type factorizability arises naturally when observable outcomes are obtained through a non-injective mapping from an underlying configuration space. In this setting, the standard factorization assumption can be viewed as an implicit requirement that observable variables admit a jointly factorizable completion at the underlying level. We demonstrate that this requirement need not hold when the mapping from underlying configurations to observables is many-to-one. The resulting breakdown of probabilistic factorization does not rely on superluminal dynamics or hidden causal influences, but follows from information loss under projection. Observable outcomes correspond to equivalence classes of underlying configurations, preventing the assignment of independent local variables. We illustrate this mechanism with an explicit toy model producing Bell–CHSH violations while preserving operational no-signalling and statistical independence of measurement settings. The model is not intended to reproduce quantum correlations quantitatively, and may exceed the Tsirelson bound; its role is to isolate the structural origin of the violation. This analysis does not contradict Bell’s theorem, but identifies a class of effective descriptions for which its factorizability assumption does not apply. The framework preserves locality at the underlying level, introduces no additional hidden-variable dynamics, and does not modify quantum mechanics. It clarifies how classical factorization is recovered in regimes where the effective mapping becomes approximately injective. In the operator language of quantum theory, the same mechanism admits a natural reformulation in terms of reduction to an effective observable subalgebra by a noncommutative conditional expectation.

Quantum ReportsVol. 8(2)
Université Paris Nanterre (FR)
Reduced inequalities
Openalex Percentile: Top 7%
Quantum Mechanics and Applications
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