Entanglement Assistance Research Articles

Superadditivity of the Classical Capacity with Limited Entanglement Assistance.

Finding the optimal encoding strategies can be challenging for communication using quantum channels, as classical and quantum capacities may be superadditive. Entanglement assistance can often simplify this task, as the entanglement-assisted classical capacity for any channel is additive, making entanglement across channel uses unnecessary. If the entanglement assistance is limited, the picture is much more unclear. Suppose the classical capacity is superadditive, then the classical capacity with limited entanglement assistance could retain superadditivity by continuity arguments. If the classical capacity is additive, it is unknown if superadditivity can still be developed with limited entanglement assistance. We show this is possible, by providing an example. We construct a channel for which the classical capacity is additive, but that with limited entanglement assistance can be superadditive. This shows entanglement plays a weird role in communication, and we still understand very little about it.

Additive Classical Capacity of Quantum Channels Assisted by Noisy Entanglement.

We give a capacity formula for the classical information transmission over a noisy quantum channel, with separable encoding by the sender and limited resources provided by the receiver's preshared ancilla. Instead of a pure state, we consider the signal-ancilla pair in a mixed state, purified by a "witness." Thus, the signal-witness correlation limits the resource available from the signal-ancilla correlation. Our formula characterizes the utility of different forms of resources, including noisy or limited entanglement assistance, for classical communication. With separable encoding, the sender's signals across multiple channel uses are still allowed to be entangled, yet our capacity formula is additive. In particular, for generalized covariant channels, our capacity formula has a simple closed form. Moreover, our additive capacity formula upper bounds the general coherent attack's information gain in various two-way quantum key distribution protocols. For Gaussian protocols, the additivity of the formula indicates that the collective Gaussian attack is the most powerful.

Super-additivity and entanglement assistance in quantum reading

Quantum information theory determines the maximum rates at which information can be transmitted through physical systems described by quantum mechanics. Here we consider the communication protocol known as quantum reading. Quantum reading is a protocol for retrieving the information stored in a digital memory by using a quantum probe, e.g., shining quantum states of light to read an optical memory. In a variety of situations using a quantum probe enhances the performance of the reading protocol in terms of fidelity, data density and energy efficiency. Here we review and characterize the quantum reading capacity of a memory model, defined as the maximum rate of reliable reading. We show that, like other quantities in quantum information theory, the quantum reading capacity is super-additive. Moreover, we determine conditions under which the use of an entangled ancilla improves the performance of quantum reading.

Entanglement-assisted classical capacities of compound and arbitrarily varying quantum channels

We consider classical message transmission under entanglement assistance for compound memoryless and arbitrarily varying quantum channels. In both cases, we prove general coding theorems together with corresponding weak converse bounds. In this way, we obtain single-letter characterizations of the entanglement-assisted classical capacities for both channel models. Moreover, we show that the entanglement-assisted classical capacity does exhibit no strong converse property for some compound quantum channels for the average as well as the maximal error criterion. A strong converse to the entanglement-assisted classical capacities does hold for each arbitrarily varying quantum channel.

Channel Simulation and Coded Source Compression

Coded source compression, also known as source compression with helpers, has been a major variant of distributed source compression, but has hitherto received little attention in the quantum regime. This work treats and solves the corresponding quantum coded source compression through an observation that connects coded source compression with channel simulation. First, we consider classical source coding with quantum side information where the quantum side information is observed by a helper and sent to the decoder via a classical channel. We derive a single-letter characterization of the achievable rate region for this problem. The direct coding theorem of our result is proved via the measurement compression theory of Winter, a quantum-to-classical channel simulation. Our result reveals that a helper's scheme which separately conducts a measurement and a compression is suboptimal, and measurement compression seems necessary to achieve the optimal rate region. We then study coded source compression in the fully quantum regime, where two different scenarios are considered depending on the types of communication channels between the legitimate source and the receiver. We further allow entanglement assistance from the quantum helper in both scenarios. We characterize the involved quantum resources, and derive single-letter expressions of the achievable rate region. The direct coding proofs are based on well-known quantum protocols, the quantum state merging protocol and the fully quantum Slepian-Wolf protocol, together with the quantum reverse Shannon theorem.

Non-binary entanglement-assisted quantum stabilizer codes

In this paper, we present the $p^m$-ary entanglement-assisted (EA) stabilizer formalism, where $p$ is a prime and $m$ is a positive integer. Given an arbitrary non-abelian ``stabilizer", the problem of code construction and encoding is settled perfectly in the case of $m=1$. The optimal number of required maximally entangled pairs is discussed and an algorithm to determine the encoding and decoding circuits is proposed. We also generalize several bounds on $p$-ary EA stabilizer codes, such as the BCH bound, the G-V bound and the linear programming bound. However, the issue becomes tricky when it comes to $m>1$, in which case, the former construction method applies only when the non-commuting ``stabilizer" satisfies a sophisticated limitation.

Alignment of Polarized Sets

Ar{\i}kan's polar coding technique is based on the idea of synthesizing $n$ channels from the $n$ instances of the physical channel by a simple linear encoding transformation. Each synthesized channel corresponds to a particular input to the encoder. For large $n$, the synthesized channels become either essentially noiseless or almost perfectly noisy, but in total carry as much information as the original $n$ channels. Capacity can therefore be achieved by transmitting messages over the essentially noiseless synthesized channels. Unfortunately, the set of inputs corresponding to reliable synthesized channels is poorly understood, in particular how the set depends on the underlying physical channel. In this work, we present two analytic conditions sufficient to determine if the reliable inputs corresponding to different discrete memoryless channels are aligned or not, i.e. if one set is contained in the other. Understanding the alignment of the polarized sets is important as it is directly related to universality properties of the induced polar codes, which are essential in particular for network coding problems. We demonstrate the performance of our conditions on a few examples for wiretap and broadcast channels. Finally we show that these conditions imply that the simple quantum polar coding scheme of Renes et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 050504 (2012)] requires entanglement assistance for general channels, but also show such assistance to be unnecessary in many cases of interest.

Construction of Quantum LDPC Codes From Classical Row-Circulant QC-LDPCs

Classical row-circulant quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity check (LDPC) matrices are known to generate efficient high-rate short and moderate-length QC-LDPC codes, while the comparable random structures exhibit numerous short cycles of length-4. Therefore, we conceive a general formalism for constructing nondual-containing Calderbank–Shor–Steane (CSS)-type quantum low-density parity check (QLDPC) codes from arbitrary classical row-circulant QC-LDPC matrices. We apply our proposed formalism to the classical balanced incomplete block design (BIBD)-based row-circulant QC-LDPC codes for demonstrating that our designed codes outperform their dual-containing CSS-type counterparts as well as the entanglement-assisted (EA)-QLDPC codes.

On entanglement-assisted quantum codes achieving the entanglement-assisted Griesmer bound

The theory of entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes (EAQECCs) is a generalization of the standard stabilizer formalism. Any quaternary (or binary) linear code can be used to construct EAQECCs under the entanglement-assisted (EA) formalism. We derive an EA-Griesmer bound for linear EAQECCs, which is a quantum analog of the Griesmer bound for classical codes. This EA-Griesmer bound is tighter than known bounds for EAQECCs in the literature. For a given quaternary linear code $$\mathcal {C}$$C, we show that the parameters of the EAQECC that EA-stabilized by the dual of $$\mathcal {C}$$C can be determined by a zero radical quaternary code induced from $$\mathcal {C}$$C, and a necessary condition under which a linear EAQECC may achieve the EA-Griesmer bound is also presented. We construct four families of optimal EAQECCs and then show the necessary condition for existence of EAQECCs is also sufficient for some low-dimensional linear EAQECCs. The four families of optimal EAQECCs are degenerate codes and go beyond earlier constructions. What is more, except four codes, our $$[[n,k,d_{ea};c]]$$[[n,k,dea?c]] codes are not equivalent to any $$[[n+c,k,d]]$$[[n+c,k,d]] standard QECCs and have better error-correcting ability than any $$[[n+c,k,d]]$$[[n+c,k,d]] QECCs.

On the gain of entanglement assistance in the classical capacity of quantum Gaussian channels

Quantum channels are trace-preserving completely positive linear maps between Banach spaces of trace-class operators (Schatten classes of order 1); these are noncommutative analogs of Markov operators in classical probability theory. They also play the role of dynamical maps in quantum theory [1, Chap. 6]. The main characteristics determining the information properties of a quantum channel include its classical entanglement-assisted and unassisted capacities. The classical (unassisted) capacity C(Φ) of a channel Φ determines the limit rate of classical information transmission through Φ with any block coding at the input and the corresponding measurement at the output, and the classical entanglement-assisted channel capacity Cea(Φ) supposes, in addition, the presence of an entangled state between the input and the output of the channel Φ (a detailed description of transmission protocols can be found in [1, Chap. 8]). Since entanglement is an additional resource, it follows that Cea(Φ) ≥ C(Φ) for any channel Φ. LetH be a separable Hilbert space. By T(H) we denote the Banach space of all trace-class operators onH and byS(H), the subset of T(H) consisting of all positive operators with trace 1; we refer to such operators as quantum states and denote them by Greek letters ρ, σ, . . . . We denote a set of quantum states {ρi} with probability distributions {πi} by {πi, ρi} and call it an ensemble of states; the state ρ = ∑ i πiρi is called the average state of the ensemble {πi, ρi}. A quantum channel is a trace-preserving completely positive linear map Φ: T(HA) → T(HB) [1, Chap. 6]. Let H(ρ) be the von Neumann entropy of a state ρ, and let H(ρ‖σ) be the quantum relative entropy of states ρ and σ. For a given channel Φ and any ensemble {πi, ρi} of input quantum states, the output χ-quantity is determined by the expression

Anonymous quantum communications using the quantum one-time pad

We present the first quantum secure communication protocol for an anonymous receiver without the assistance of anonymous entanglement. In previous works, if a public sender wants to send quantum messages to a chosen receiver while protecting the identity of the receiver from others, all participants should cooperate first to construct the entanglement between the sender and the anonymous receiver. This is the most important process in anonymous quantum communications. With anonymous entanglement, the sender can communicate quantum messages to the anonymous receiver by applying teleportation protocols. In contrast, our protocol is novel and achieves communication of quantum messages directly from the public sender to the anonymous receiver based on the quantum one-time pad and current achievements. Notably, the anonymity of the receiver, as well as the privacy of the quantum messages, is perfectly protected with the exception of an exponentially small probability in our protocol.

Preserving information from the beginning to the end of time in a Robertson–Walker spacetime

Preserving information stored in a physical system subjected to noise can be modeled in a communication-theoretic paradigm, in which storage and retrieval correspond to an input encoding and output decoding, respectively. The encoding and decoding are then constructed in such a way as to protect against the action of a given noisy quantum channel. This paper considers the situation in which the noise is not due to technological imperfections, but rather to the physical laws governing the evolution of the Universe. In particular, we consider the dynamics of quantum systems under a 1 + 1 Robertson–Walker spacetime and find that the noise imparted to them is equivalent to the well known amplitude damping channel. Since one might be interested in preserving both classical and quantum information in such a scenario, we study trade-off coding strategies and determine a region of achievable rates for the preservation of both kinds of information. For applications beyond the physical setting studied here, we also determine a trade-off between achievable rates of classical and quantum information preservation when entanglement assistance is available.

Entanglement-assisted quantum codes constructed from primitive quaternary BCH codes

The entanglement-assisted (EA) formalism generalizes the standard stabilizer formalism. All quaternary linear codes can be transformed into entanglement-assisted quantum error correcting codes (EAQECCs) under this formalism. In this work, we discuss construction of EAQECCs from Hermitian non-dual containing primitive Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem (BCH) codes over the Galois field GF(4). By a careful analysis of the cyclotomic cosets contained in the defining set of a given BCH code, we can determine the optimal number of ebits that needed for constructing EAQECC from this BCH code, rather than calculate the optimal number of ebits from its parity check matrix, and derive a formula for the dimension of this BCH code. These results make it possible to specify parameters of the obtained EAQECCs in terms of the design parameters of BCH codes.

Quantum Rate-Distortion Coding With Auxiliary Resources

We extend quantum rate distortion theory by considering auxiliary resources that might be available to a sender and receiver performing lossy quantum data compression. The first setting we consider is that of quantum rate distortion coding with the help of a classical side channel. Our result here is that the regularized entanglement of formation characterizes the quantum rate distortion function, extending earlier work of Devetak and Berger. We also combine this bound with the entanglement-assisted bound from our prior work to obtain the best known bounds on the quantum rate distortion function for an isotropic qubit source. The second setting we consider is that of quantum rate distortion coding with quantum side information (QSI) available to the receiver. In order to prove results in this setting, we first state and prove a quantum reverse Shannon theorem with QSI (for tensor-power states), which extends the known tensor-power quantum reverse Shannon theorem. The achievability part of this theorem relies on the quantum state redistribution protocol, while the converse relies on the fact that the protocol can cause only a negligible disturbance to the joint state of the reference and the receiver's QSI. This quantum reverse Shannon theorem with QSI naturally leads to quantum rate-distortion theorems with QSI, with or without entanglement assistance.

Quantum Error Correction via Less Noisy Qubits

Known quantum error correction schemes are typically able to take advantage of only a limited class of classical error-correcting codes. Entanglement-assisted quantum error correction is a partial solution which made it possible to exploit any classical linear codes over the binary or quaternary finite field. However, the known entanglement-assisted scheme requires noiseless qubits that help correct quantum errors on noisy qubits, which can be too severe an assumption. We prove that a more relaxed and realistic assumption is sufficient by presenting encoding and decoding operations assisted by qubits on which quantum errors of one particular kind may occur. As in entanglement assistance, our scheme can import any binary or quaternary linear codes. If the auxiliary qubits are noiseless, our codes become entanglement-assisted codes, and saturate the quantum Singleton bound when the underlying classical codes are maximum distance separable.

Identifying the Information Gain of a Quantum Measurement

We show that quantum-to-classical channels, i.e., quantum measurements, can be asymptotically simulated by an amount of classical communication equal to the quantum mutual information of the measurement, if sufficient shared randomness is available. This result generalizes Winter's measurement compression theorem for fixed independent and identically distributed inputs [Winter, CMP 244 (157), 2004] to arbitrary inputs, and more importantly, it identifies the quantum mutual information of a measurement as the information gained by performing it, independent of the input state on which it is performed. Our result is a generalization of the classical reverse Shannon theorem to quantum-to-classical channels. In this sense, it can be seen as a quantum reverse Shannon theorem for quantum-to-classical channels, but with the entanglement assistance and quantum communication replaced by shared randomness and classical communication, respectively. The proof is based on a novel one-shot state merging protocol for "classically coherent states" as well as the post-selection technique for quantum channels, and it uses techniques developed for the quantum reverse Shannon theorem [Berta et al., CMP 306 (579), 2011].

Linear Plotkin bound for entanglement-assisted quantum codes

The entanglement-assisted (EA) formalism is a generalization of the standard stabilizer formalism, and it can transform arbitrary quaternary classical linear codes into entanglement-assisted quantum error correcting codes (EAQECCs) by using of shared entanglement between the sender and the receiver. Using the special structure of linear EAQECCs, we derive an EA-Plotkin bound for linear EAQECCs, which strengthens the previous known EA-Plotkin bound. This linear EA-Plotkin bound is tighter then the EA-Singleton bound, and matches the EA-Hamming bound and the EA-linear programming bound in some cases. We also construct three families of EAQECCs with good parameters. Some of these EAQECCs saturate this linear EA-Plotkin bound and the others are near optimal according to this bound; almost all of these linear EAQECCs are degenerate codes.

Information capacities of quantum measurement channels

We study the relation between the unassisted and entanglement-assisted classical capacities C and Cea of entanglement-breaking channels. We argue that the gain of entanglement assistance Cea/C > 1 generically for measurement channels with unsharp observables; in particular for the measurements with pure posterior states the information loss in the entanglement-assisted protocol is zero, resulting in an arbitrarily large gain for very noisy or weak signal channels. This is illustrated by examples of continuous observables corresponding to state tomography in finite dimensions and heterodyne measurement. In contrast, state preparations are characterized by the property of having no gain of entanglement assistance, Cea/C = 1.

Polar Codes for Degradable Quantum Channels

Channel polarization is a phenomenon in which a particular recursive encoding induces a set of synthesized channels from many instances of a memoryless channel, such that a fraction of the synthesized channels becomes near perfect for data transmission and the other fraction becomes near useless for this task. Mahdavifar and Vardy have recently exploited this phenomenon to construct codes that achieve the symmetric private capacity for private data transmission over a degraded wiretap channel. In the current paper, we build on their work and demonstrate how to construct quantum wiretap polar codes that achieve the symmetric private capacity of a degraded quantum wiretap channel with a classical eavesdropper. Due to the Schumacher-Westmoreland correspondence between quantum privacy and quantum coherence, we can construct quantum polar codes by operating these quantum wiretap polar codes in superposition, much like Devetak's technique for demonstrating the achievability of the coherent information rate for quantum data transmission. Our scheme achieves the symmetric coherent information rate for quantum channels that are degradable with a classical environment. This condition on the environment may seem restrictive, but we show that many quantum channels satisfy this criterion, including amplitude damping channels, photon-detected jump channels, dephasing channels, erasure channels, and cloning channels. Our quantum polar coding scheme has the desirable properties of being channel-adapted and symmetric capacity-achieving along with having an efficient encoder, but we have not demonstrated that the decoding is efficient. Also, the scheme may require entanglement assistance, but we show that the rate of entanglement consumption vanishes in the limit of large blocklength if the channel is degradable with classical environment.

Polar Codes for Private and Quantum Communication Over Arbitrary Channels

We construct new polar coding schemes for the transmission of quantum or private classical information over arbitrary quantum channels. In the former case, our coding scheme achieves the symmetric coherent information and in the latter the symmetric private information. Both schemes are built from a polar coding construction capable of transmitting classical information over a quantum channel [Wilde and Guha, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, in press]. Appropriately merging two such classical-quantum schemes, one for transmitting "amplitude" information and the other for transmitting "phase," leads to the new private and quantum coding schemes, similar to the construction for Pauli and erasure channels in [Renes, Dupuis, and Renner, Physical Review Letters 109, 050504 (2012)]. The encoding is entirely similar to the classical case, and thus efficient. The decoding can also be performed by successive cancellation, as in the classical case, but no efficient successive cancellation scheme is yet known for arbitrary quantum channels. An efficient code construction is unfortunately still unknown. Generally, our two coding schemes require entanglement or secret-key assistance, respectively, but we extend two known conditions under which the needed assistance rate vanishes. Finally, although our results are formulated for qubit channels, we show how the scheme can be extended to multiple qubits. This then demonstrates a near-explicit coding method for realizing one of the most striking phenomena in quantum information theory: the superactivation effect, whereby two quantum channels which individually have zero quantum capacity can have a non-zero quantum capacity when used together.