One of the most important problems in physics is to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity, and some authors have suggested that this may be realized at the expense of having to drop the quantum formalism in favour of a more general theory. Here, we propose a mechanism to make general claims on the microscopic structure of the Universe by postulating that any post-quantum theory should recover classical physics in the macroscopic limit. We use this mechanism to bound the strength of correlations between distant observers in any physical theory. Although several quantum limits are recovered, such as the set of two-point quantum correlators, our results suggest that there exist plausible microscopic theories of Nature that predict correlations impossible to reproduce in any quantum mechanical system.

We show how entanglement may be quantified in spin and cold atom many-body systems using standard experimental techniques only. The scheme requires no assumptions on the state in the laboratory, and a lower bound to the entanglement can be read off directly from the scattering cross section of neutrons deflected from solid state samples or the time-of-flight distribution of cold atoms in optical lattices, respectively. This removes a major obstacle which so far has prevented the direct and quantitative experimental study of genuine quantum correlations in many-body systems: The need for a full characterization of the state to quantify the entanglement contained in it. Instead, the scheme presented here relies solely on global measurements that are routinely performed and is versatile enough to accommodate systems and measurements different from the ones we exemplify in this work.