Witnessing irreducible dimension

The Hilbert space dimension of a quantum system is the most basic quantifier of its information content. Lower bounds on the dimension can be certified in a device-independent way, based only on observed statistics. We highlight that some such "dimension witnesses" capture only the presence of systems of some dimension, which in a sense is trivial, not the capacity of performing information processing on them, which is the point of experimental efforts to control high-dimensional systems. In order to capture this aspect, we introduce the notion of irreducible dimension of a quantum behaviour. This dimension can be certified, and we provide a witness for irreducible dimension four.