Certified Private Relational Time from Entanglement

Abstract

We introduce an “entangled clock” in which time is defined operationally by discrete measurement registrations on a singlet state. Locally, each party’s tick rate is fixed by the unbiased marginals. The nontrivial resource is the relational (coincidence-tick) stream: because the singlet’s information budget is entirely exhausted by joint properties, the only definite temporal structure resides in the correlations between the two parties. Operationally, after exchanging time tags and outcomes, Alice and Bob identify synchronized events (that is, the (Formula presented.) channel) and thereby obtain a joint tick record. Comparing the (Formula presented.) coincidence rate (Formula presented.) to Peres’ isotropic bomb-fragment local-hidden-variable model (yielding (Formula presented.)), we find that for obtuse analyzer separations the quantum prediction exceeds this natural classical benchmark, with a maximal relative excess of about (Formula presented.) near (Formula presented.). We emphasize that this “faster ticking” refers to the rate of identified coincidence ticks under a specific operational convention, not to an improved local clock rate, precision, or stability. Finally, by using multiple settings and a Bell test, we outline “Certified Private Time”: a device-independent certification of unpredictability/privacy of the relational time-stamp record against adversaries lacking foreknowledge of the settings, analogous to certified randomness generation.