Beyond qubits: fermionic nonlocality in quantum networks

Bell’s theorem shows that classical particles cannot reproduce all correlations generated by quantum entanglement without an additional nonlocal resource, such as communication. In this talk, we explore an analogous separation within quantum theory itself. Indistinguishable fermions transmitted through a quantum network can generate correlations that distinguishable particles or indistinguishable bosons cannot reproduce without additional communication. In this operational sense, fermionic information carriers, or febits, can be more nonlocal than qubits. I will explain the main intuition behind this result and the role of fermionic anticommutation and indistinguishability, then discuss how fermions can surpass all qubit-based protocols for certain distributed computing tasks. The result motivates studying quantum information processing beyond qubits.