Channel Simulation in Quantum Metrology

We consider the estimation of noise parameters in a quantum channel, assuming the most general strategy allowed by quantum mechanics. This is based on the exploitation of unlimited entanglement and arbitrary quantum operations, so that the channel inputs may be interactively updated. In this general scenario, we draw a novel connection between quantum metrology and teleportation. In fact, for any teleportation-covariant channel (e.g., Pauli, erasure, or Gaussian channel), we find that adaptive noise estimation cannot beat the standard quantum limit, with the quantum Fisher information being determined by the channel's Choi matrix. As an example, we establish the ultimate precision for estimating excess noise in a thermal-loss channel, which is crucial for quantum cryptography. Because our general methodology applies to any functional that is monotonic under trace-preserving maps, it can be applied to simplify other adaptive protocols, including those for quantum channel discrimination. Setting the ultimate limits for noise estimation and discrimination paves the way for exploring the boundaries of quantum sensing, imaging, and tomography.

The fidelity function for quantum states has been widely used in quantum information science and frequently arises in the quantification of optimal performances for the estimation and distinguishing of quantum states. A fidelity function for quantum channels is expected to have the same wide applications in quantum information science. In this paper we propose a fidelity function for quantum channels and show that various distance measures on quantum channels can be obtained from this fidelity function; for example, the Bures angle and the Bures distance can be extended to quantum channels via this fidelity function. We then show that the distances between quantum channels lead naturally to a quantum channel Fisher information which quantifies the ultimate precision limit in quantum metrology; the ultimate precision limit can thus be seen as a manifestation of the distances between quantum channels. We also show that the fidelity of quantum channels provides a unified framework for perfect quantum channel discrimination and quantum metrology. In particular, we show that the minimum number of uses needed for perfect channel discrimination is exactly the counterpart of the precision limit in quantum metrology, and various useful lower bounds for the minimum number of uses needed for perfect channel discrimination can be obtained via this connection.

Upper bounds for private communication over quantum channels can be derived by adopting channel simulation, protocol stretching, and relative entropy of entanglement. All these ingredients have led to single-letter upper bounds to the secret key capacity which can be directly computed over suitable resource states. For bosonic Gaussian channels, the tightest upper bounds have been derived by employing teleportation simulation over asymptotic resource states, namely the asymptotic Choi matrices of these channels. In this work, we adopt a different approach. We show that teleporting over an analytical class of finite-energy resource states allows us to closely approximate the ultimate bounds for increasing energy, so as to provide increasingly tight upper bounds to the secret-key capacity of one-mode phase-insensitive Gaussian channels. We then show that an optimization over the same class of resource states can be used to bound the maximum secret key rates that are achievable in a finite number of channel uses.

In the literature on the continuous-variable bosonic teleportation protocol due to [Braunstein and Kimble, Phys. Rev. Lett., 80(4):869, 1998], it is often loosely stated that this protocol converges to a perfect teleportation of an input state in the limit of ideal squeezing and ideal detection, but the exact form of this convergence is typically not clarified. In this paper, I explicitly clarify that the convergence is in the strong sense, and not the uniform sense, and furthermore, that the convergence occurs for any input state to the protocol, including the infinite-energy Basel states defined and discussed here. I also prove, in contrast to the above result, that the teleportation simulations of pure-loss, thermal, pure-amplifier, amplifier, and additive-noise channels converge both strongly and uniformly to the original channels, in the limit of ideal squeezing and detection for the simulations. For these channels, I give explicit uniform bounds on the accuracy of their teleportation simulations. I then extend these uniform convergence results to particular multi-mode bosonic Gaussian channels. These convergence statements have important implications for mathematical proofs that make use of the teleportation simulation of bosonic Gaussian channels, some of which have to do with bounding their non-asymptotic secret-key-agreement capacities. As a byproduct of the discussion given here, I confirm the correctness of the proof of such bounds from my joint work with Berta and Tomamichel from [Wilde, Tomamichel, Berta, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 63(3):1792, March 2017]. Furthermore, I show that it is not necessary to invoke the energy-constrained diamond distance in order to confirm the correctness of this proof.

What is the ultimate performance for discriminating two arbitrary quantum channels acting on a finite-dimensional Hilbert space? Here we address this basic question by deriving a general and fundamental lower bound. More precisely, we investigate the symmetric discrimination of two arbitrary qudit channels by means of the most general protocols based on adaptive (feedback-assisted) quantum operations. In this general scenario, we first show how port-based teleportation can be used to simplify these adaptive protocols into a much simpler non-adaptive form, designing a new type of teleportation stretching. Then, we prove that the minimum error probability affecting the channel discrimination cannot beat a bound determined by the Choi matrices of the channels, establishing a general, yet computable formula for quantum hypothesis testing. As a consequence of this bound, we derive ultimate limits and no-go theorems for adaptive quantum illumination and single-photon quantum optical resolution. Finally, we show how the methodology can also be applied to other tasks, such as quantum metrology, quantum communication and secret key generation.

This paper establishes single-letter formulas for the exact entanglement cost of simulating quantum channels under free quantum operations that completely preserve positivity of the partial transpose (PPT). First, we introduce the $\kappa$-entanglement measure for point-to-point quantum channels, based on the idea of the $\kappa$-entanglement of bipartite states, and we establish several fundamental properties for it, including amortization collapse, monotonicity under PPT superchannels, additivity, normalization, faithfulness, and non-convexity. Second, we introduce and solve the exact entanglement cost for simulating quantum channels in both the parallel and sequential settings, along with the assistance of free PPT-preserving operations. In particular, we establish that the entanglement cost in both cases is given by the same single-letter formula, the $\kappa$-entanglement measure of a quantum channel. We further show that this cost is equal to the largest $\kappa$-entanglement that can be shared or generated by the sender and receiver of the channel. This formula is calculable by a semidefinite program, thus allowing for an efficiently computable solution for general quantum channels. Noting that the sequential regime is more powerful than the parallel regime, another notable implication of our result is that both regimes have the same power for exact quantum channel simulation, when PPT superchannels are free. For several basic Gaussian quantum channels, we show that the exact entanglement cost is given by the Holevo--Werner formula [Holevo and Werner, Phys. Rev. A 63, 032312 (2001)], giving an operational meaning of the Holevo-Werner quantity for these channels.

Dual to the usual noisy channel coding problem, where a noisy (classical or quantum) channel is used to simulate a noiseless one, reverse Shannon theorems concern the use of noiseless channels to simulate noisy ones, and more generally the use of one noisy channel to simulate another. For channels of nonzero capacity, this simulation is always possible, but for it to be efficient, auxiliary resources of the proper kind and amount are generally required. In the classical case, shared randomness between sender and receiver is a sufficient auxiliary resource, regardless of the nature of the source, but in the quantum case, the requisite auxiliary resources for efficient simulation depend on both the channel being simulated, and the source from which the channel inputs are coming. For tensor power sources (the quantum generalization of classical memoryless sources), entanglement in the form of standard ebits (maximally entangled pairs of qubits) is sufficient, but for general sources, which may be arbitrarily correlated or entangled across channel inputs, additional resources, such as entanglement-embezzling states or backward communication, are generally needed. Combining existing and new results, we establish the amounts of communication and auxiliary resources needed in both the classical and quantum cases, the tradeoffs among them, and the loss of simulation efficiency when auxiliary resources are absent or insufficient. In particular, we find a new single-letter expression for the excess forward communication cost of coherent feedback simulations of quantum channels (i.e., simulations in which the sender retains what would escape into the environment in an ordinary simulation), on nontensor-power sources in the presence of unlimited ebits but no other auxiliary resource. Our results on tensor power sources establish a strong converse to the entanglement-assisted capacity theorem.

We introduce the study of quantum protocols that probabilistically simulate quantum channels from a sender in the future to a receiver in the past. The maximum probability of simulation is determined by causality and depends on the amount and type (classical or quantum) of information that the channel can transmit. We illustrate this dependence in several examples, including ideal classical and quantum channels, measure-and-prepare channels, partial trace channels, and universal cloning channels. For the simulation of partial trace channels, we consider generalized teleportation protocols that take N input copies of a pure state in the future and produce M < N output copies of the same state in the past. In this case, we show that the maximum probability of successful teleportation increases with the number of input copies, a feature that was impossible in classical physics. In the limit of asymptotically large N, the probability converges to the probability of simulation for an ideal classical channel. Similar results are found for universal cloning channels from N copies to M > N approximate copies, exploiting a time-reversal duality between universal cloning and partial trace.

Upper bounds on the private capacity for bosonic Gaussian channels

A quantum channel is usually represented as a sum of Kraus operators. The recent study [Phys. Rev. A 98, 032328 (2018)] has shown that applying a perturbation to the Kraus operators in qubit Pauli channels, the dynamical maps exhibit interesting properties, such as non-Markovianity, singularity. This has sparked our interest in studying the properties of other quantum channels. In this work, we study a special class of generalized Weyl channel where the Kraus operators are proportional to the Weyl diagonal matrices and the rest are vanishing. We use the Choi matrix of intermediate map to study quantum non-Markovianity. The crossover point of the eigenvalues of Choi matrix is a singularity of the decoherence rates in the canonical form of the master equation. Moreover, we identify the non-Markovianity based on the methods of CP divisibility and distinguishability. We also quantify the non-Markovianity in terms of the Hall-Cresser-Li-Andersson (HCLA) measure and the Breuer-Laine-Piilo (BLP) measure, respectively. In particular, we choose mutually unbiased bases as a pair of orthogonal initial states to quantify the non-Markovianity based on the BLP measure.

Quantum process tomography is the task of reconstructing unknown quantum channels from measured data. In this work, we introduce compressed sensing-based methods that facilitate the reconstruction of quantum channels of low Kraus rank. Our main contribution is the analysis of a natural measurement model for this task: We assume that data is obtained by sending pure states into the channel and measuring expectation values on the output. Neither ancillary systems nor coherent operations across multiple channel uses are required. Most previous results on compressed process reconstruction reduce the problem to quantum state tomography on the channel's Choi matrix. While this ansatz yields recovery guarantees from an essentially minimal number of measurements, physical implementations of such schemes would typically involve ancillary systems. A priori, it is unclear whether a measurement model tailored directly to quantum process tomography might require more measurements. We establish that this is not the case.Technically, we prove recovery guarantees for three different reconstruction algorithms. The reconstructions are based on a trace, diamond, and ℓ2-norm minimization, respectively. Our recovery guarantees are uniform in the sense that with one random choice of measurement settings all quantum channels can be recovered equally well. Moreover, stability against arbitrary measurement noise and robustness against violations of the low-rank assumption is guaranteed. Numerical studies demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.

Communication over a noisy channel is often conducted in a setting in which different input symbols to the channel incur a certain cost. For example, for bosonic quantum channels, the cost associated with an input state is the number of photons, which is proportional to the energy consumed. In such a setting, it is often useful to know the maximum amount of information that can be reliably transmitted per cost incurred. This is known as the capacity per unit cost. In this paper, we generalize the capacity per unit cost to various communication tasks involving a quantum channel such as classical communication, entanglement-assisted classical communication, private communication, and quantum communication. For each task, we define the corresponding capacity per unit cost and derive a formula for it analogous to that of the usual capacity. Furthermore, for the special and natural case in which there is a zero-cost state, we obtain expressions in terms of an optimized relative entropy involving the zero-cost state. For each communication task, we construct an explicit pulse-position-modulation coding scheme that achieves the capacity per unit cost. Finally, we compute capacities per unit cost for various bosonic Gaussian channels and introduce the notion of a blocklength constraint as a proposed solution to the long-standing issue of infinite capacities per unit cost. This motivates the idea of a blocklength-cost duality, on which we elaborate in depth.

Quantum channels describe general transformations of the state of a physical system and play a fundamental role in many fields. It promises wide range of applications, because any physical process can be represented as a quantum channel transforming an initial state into a final state. The evolution of system undergoing a quantum channel is not necessary unitary which makes it unrealisable without ancillary system. Inspired by the method performing non-unitary operator by the linear combination of unitary operations, we proposed a quantum algorithm for the simulation of universal single-qubit channel, described by a convex combination of two generalized extreme channels corresponding to four Kraus operators, and is scalable to arbitrary higher dimension. We demonstrate the whole algorithm experimentally using the universal IBM cloud quantum computer and study properties of different qubit quantum channels. We illustrate the quantum capacity of the general qubit quantum channels, which quantifies the amount of quantum information that can be protected. There is a general agreement between the theoretical predictions and the experiments, which strongly supported our method. By realizing arbitrary qubit channel, this work provides a universal way to explore various properties of quantum channel and novel prospect of quantum communication.

The data processing inequality is the most basic requirement for any meaningful measure of information. It essentially states that distinguishability measures between states decrease if we apply a quantum channel and is the centerpiece of many results in information theory. Moreover, it justifies the operational interpretation of most entropic quantities. In this work, we revisit the notion of contraction coefficients of quantum channels, which provide sharper and specialized versions of the data processing inequality. A concept closely related to data processing is partial orders on quantum channels. First, we discuss several quantum extensions of the well-known less noisy ordering and relate them to contraction coefficients. We further define approximate versions of the partial orders and show how they can give strengthened and conceptually simple proofs of several results on approximating capacities. Moreover, we investigate the relation to other partial orders in the literature and their properties, particularly with regard to tensorization. We then examine the relation between contraction coefficients with other properties of quantum channels such as hypercontractivity. Next, we extend the framework of contraction coefficients to general f-divergences and prove several structural results. Finally, we consider two important classes of quantum channels, namely Weyl-covariant and bosonic Gaussian channels. For those, we determine new contraction coefficients and relations for various partial orders.

We aim to devise feasible, efficient verification schemes for bosonic channels. To this end, we construct an average-fidelity witness that yields a tight lower bound for average fidelity plus a general framework for verifying optimal quantum channels. For both multi-mode unitary Gaussian channels and single-mode amplification channels, we present experimentally feasible average-fidelity witnesses and reliable verification schemes, for which sample complexity scales polynomially with respect to all channel specification parameters. Our verification scheme provides an approach to benchmark the performance of bosonic channels on a set of Gaussian-distributed coherent states by employing only two-mode squeezed vacuum states and local homodyne detections. Our results demonstrate how to perform feasible tests of quantum components designed for continuous-variable quantum information processing.