Entanglement-assisted Capacity Research Articles

Entanglement-symmetries of covariant channels

Let G and G′ be monoidally equivalent compact quantum groups, and let H be a Hopf-Galois object realising a monoidal equivalence between these groups' representation categories. This monoidal equivalence induces an equivalence Chan(G) → Chan(G′), where Chan(G) is the category whose objects are finite-dimensional C∗-algebras with an action of G and whose morphisms are covariant channels. We show that, if the Hopf-Galois object H has a finite-dimensional *-representation, then channels related by this equivalence can simulate each other using a finite-dimensional entangled resource. We use this result to calculate the entanglement-assisted capacities of certain quantum channels.

Transceiver Designs Approaching the Entanglement-Assisted Communication Capacity

Preshared entanglement can significantly boost communication rates in the high thermal-noise and low-brightness transmitter regime. In this regime, for a lossy bosonic channel with additive thermal noise, the ratio between the entanglement-assisted capacity and the Holevo capacity---the maximum reliable communication rate permitted by quantum mechanics without any preshared entanglement---scales as $\mathrm{log}(1/{\overline{N}}_{S})$, where the mean transmitted photon number per mode, ${\overline{N}}_{S}\ensuremath{\ll}1$. Thus, preshared entanglement, e.g., distributed by the quantum internet or a satellite-assisted quantum link, promises to significantly improve low-power radio-frequency communications. In this paper, we propose a pair of structured quantum transceiver designs that leverage continuous-variable preshared entanglement (generated, e.g., from a down-conversion source), binary phase modulation, and non-Gaussian joint detection over a codeword block, to achieve this scaling law of capacity enhancement. Furthermore, we describe a modification to the aforesaid receiver using a frontend that uses sum-frequency generation sandwiched with dynamically programmable in-line two-mode squeezers, and a receiver backend that takes full advantage of the output of the receiver's frontend by employing a nondestructive multimode vacuum-or-not measurement to achieve the entanglement-assisted classical communication capacity.

Improving classical capacity of qubit dynamical maps through stationary state manipulation

We analyze the evolution of Holevo and entanglement-assisted classical capacities for two classes of phase-covariant channels. In particular, we show that these capacities can be improved by changing the stationary state of the channel, which is closely related to its non-unitality degree. The more non-unital the channel, the greater its capacity. The channel parameters are engineered through mixtures on the level of dynamical maps, time-local generators, and memory kernels, for which we propose construction methods. For highly non-unital maps, we achieve a temporary increase in the classical capacity that exceeds the entanglement-assisted classical capacity of the unital map. This shows that non-unitality can become a better quantum resource for information transition purposes than quantum entanglement.

Capacities of the covariant Pauli channel

We study four well-known capacities of a two-parameter family of qubit Pauli channels. These are the channels that are covariant under the $\text{SO}(2)$ group and contain the depolarizing channel as a special case. We find exact expressions for the classical capacity and entanglement-assisted capacities, and analytically determine the regions where the quantum capacity of the channel vanishes. We then use a flag extension to find upper bound for the quantum capacity and private capacity of these channels in the entire region of parameter space and also obtain the lower bound for the quantum capacity by calculating the single-shot quantum capacity numerically. In conjunction with previous results on depolarizing channels, our result is one step forward for determining the capacities of the full Pauli channel.

Variational estimation of capacity bounds for quantum channels

We propose a framework to variationally obtain detectable capacity bounds for quantum channels. The proposal of this framework is motivated by the difficulty of estimating the von Neumann entropy of an unknown quantum state. Instead of estimating the von Neumann entropy at the channel output, we propose to estimate the state purity---which can be measured by a single measurement setting---followed by bounding the von Neumann entropy from above and below. This procedure leads to new upper and lower bounds on various communication rates of quantum channels for some fixed input states. Then, by utilizing the variational method to find optimal input states we obtain lower bounds on (i) the quantum capacity of arbitrary channels, (ii) the entanglement-assisted classical capacity of arbitrary channels, and (iii) the classical capacity of covariant channels. Corresponding to these lower bounds, we also obtain upper bounds on (i) $N$-shot coherent information, (ii) the entanglement-assisted classical capacity, and (iii) the $N$-shot Holevo capacity of arbitrary quantum channels. All these bounds can be estimated by a single measurement setting without needing a full process tomography or any further a priori knowledge, e.g., preferred basis of the channel.

Computable limits of optical multiple-access communications

Communication rates over quantum channels can be boosted by entanglement, via superadditivity phenomena or entanglement assistance. Superadditivity refers to the capacity improvement from entangling inputs across multiple channel uses. Nevertheless, when unlimited entanglement assistance is available, the entanglement between channel uses becomes unnecessary -- the entanglement-assisted (EA) capacity of a single-sender and single-receiver channel is additive. We generalize the additivity of EA capacity to general multiple-access channels (MACs) for the total communication rate. Furthermore, for optical communication modelled as phase-insensitive bosonic Gaussian MACs, we prove that the optimal total rate is achieved by Gaussian entanglement and therefore can be efficiently evaluated. To benchmark entanglement's advantage, we propose computable outer bounds for the capacity region without entanglement assistance. Finally, we formulate an EA version of minimum entropy conjecture, which leads to the additivity of the capacity region of phase-insensitive bosonic Gaussian MACs if it is true. The computable limits confirm entanglement's boosts in optical multiple-access communications.

Relativistic quantum communication: Energy cost and channel capacities

We consider the communication of classical and quantum information between two arbitrary observers in asymptotically flat spacetimes (possibly containing black holes) and investigate what is the energy cost for such information transmission. By means of localized two-level quantum systems, sender and receiver can use a quantum scalar field as a communication channel. As we have already shown in a previous paper, such a channel has non-vanishing classical capacity as well as entanglement-assisted classical and quantum capacities. Here we will show that the change in the expectation value of the energy of the system during the communication process can be separated in: (i) a contribution coming from the particle creation due to the change of the spacetime, (ii) a contribution associated with the energy needed to switch-on/off each qubit, and {\bf (iii)} a term which comes from the communication process itself. For the quantum channel considered here, we show that the extra energy cost needed for communication vanishes. As a result, if one has already created a system of qubits for some specific task (e.g., quantum computation) one can also reliably convey information between its parts with no extra energy cost. We conclude the paper by illustrating the form of the channel capacities and energy contributions in two paradigmatic cases in Minkowski spacetime: (1) sender and receiver in inertial motion and (2) sender in inertial motion while the receiver is uniformly accelerated.

Quantum Receivers for Entanglement Assisted Classical Optical Communications

Entanglement assisted (EA) communication represents an interesting alternative to classical communication, in particular in low-brightness and highly noisy regime when it outperforms significantly corresponding classical counterpart in terms of the channel capacity. Even though that the EA capacity is known for decades the optimum quantum receiver has not been determined yet. In this paper, we propose several low-complexity quantum receivers outperforming recently proposed receivers employing the optical parametric amplifier as a basic building block. We demonstrate by simulations that the capacity of the proposed EA schemes, employing Gaussian modulation and the proposed low-complexity joint receivers, can significantly outperform both the Holevo capacity and classical homodyne and heterodyne channel capacities.

Entanglement-assisted capacity regions and protocol designs for quantum multiple-access channels

We solve the entanglement-assisted (EA) classical capacity region of quantum multiple-access channels (MACs) with an arbitrary number of senders. As an example, we consider the bosonic thermal-loss MAC and solve the one-shot capacity region enabled by an entanglement source composed of sender-receiver pairwise two-mode squeezed vacuum states. The EA capacity region is strictly larger than the capacity region without entanglement-assistance. With two-mode squeezed vacuum states as the source and phase modulation as the encoding, we also design practical receiver protocols to realize the entanglement advantages. Four practical receiver designs, based on optical parametric amplifiers, are given and analyzed. In the parameter region of a large noise background, the receivers can enable a simultaneous rate advantage of 82.0% for each sender. Due to teleportation and superdense coding, our results for EA classical communication can be directly extended to EA quantum communication at half of the rates. Our work provides a unique and practical network communication scenario where entanglement can be beneficial.

Maximum information gain of approximate quantum position measurement

We perform a quantum information analysis for multi-mode Gaussian approximate position measurements, underlying noisy homodyning in quantum optics. The “Gaussian maximizer” property is established for the entropy reduction of these measurements which provides explicit formulas for computations of their maximum information gain or entanglement-assisted capacity. The case of one mode is discussed in detail.

Permutation Enhances Classical Communication Assisted by Entangled States

We study classical communication over a noisy quantum channel when bipartite states are preshared between the sender and the receiver, and one of the following encoding strategies are available: i) local operations; ii) local operations and one-way classical communication; iii) local operations and global permutations. Our main result is a capacity formula for strategy iii). This formula's two endpoints are the capacity formula in strategy i) and the entanglement-assisted classical capacity. Interestingly, these capacities satisfy the strong converse property, and thus the formula serves as a sharp dividing line between achievable and unachievable rates of communication. We prove that the difference between the capacities by strategy i) and strategy iii) is upper bounded by the discord of formation of the preshared state. What's more, we show that strategy ii) has no advantage over strategy i) in the weak converse regime. As examples, we derive these capacities analytically by the above strategies for some fundamental quantum channels. In some cases, the capacity of strategy iii) is strictly larger than those of strategies i) and ii) whenever entanglement assistance is available. Our results witness the power of random permutation in entanglement-assisted classical communication.

Quantum-Enabled Communication without a Phase Reference.

A phase reference has been a standard requirement in continuous-variable quantum sensing and communication protocols. However, maintaining a phase reference is challenging due to environmental fluctuations, preventing quantum phenomena such as entanglement and coherence from being utilized in many scenarios. We show that quantum communication and entanglement-assisted communication without a phase reference are possible, when a short-time memory effect is present. The degradation in the communication rate of classical or quantum information transmission decreases inversely with the correlation time. Exact solutions of the quantum capacity and entanglement-assisted classical and quantum capacity for pure dephasing channels are derived, where non-Gaussian multipartite-entangled states show strict advantages over usual Gaussian sources. For thermal-loss dephasing channels, lower bounds of the capacities are derived. The lower bounds also extend to scenarios with fading effects in the channel. In addition, for entanglement-assisted communication, the lower bounds can be achieved by a simple phase-encoding scheme on two-mode squeezed vacuum sources, when the noise is large.

Quantum Asymptotic Spectra of Graphs and Non-Commutative Graphs, and Quantum Shannon Capacities

We study quantum versions of the Shannon capacity of graphs and non-commutative graphs. We introduce the asymptotic spectrum of graphs with respect to quantum and entanglement-assisted homomorphisms, and we introduce the asymptotic spectrum of non-commutative graphs with respect to entanglement-assisted homomorphisms. We apply Strassen’s spectral theorem (J. Reine Angew. Math., 1988) in order to obtain dual characterizations of the corresponding Shannon capacities and asymptotic preorders in terms of their asymptotic spectra. This work extends the study of the asymptotic spectrum of graphs initiated by Zuiddam (Combinatorica, 2019) to the quantum domain. We then exhibit spectral points in the new quantum asymptotic spectra and discuss their relations with the asymptotic spectrum of graphs. In particular, we prove that the (fractional) real and complex Haemers bounds upper bound the quantum Shannon capacity, which is defined as the regularization of the quantum independence number (Mancinska and Roberson, J. Combin. Theory Ser. B, 2016), and that the fractional real and complex Haemers bounds are elements in the quantum asymptotic spectrum of graphs. This is in contrast to the Haemers bounds defined over certain finite fields, which can be strictly smaller than the quantum Shannon capacity. Moreover, since the Haemers bound can be strictly smaller than the Lovasz theta function (Haemers, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 1979), we find that the quantum Shannon capacity and the Lovasz theta function do not coincide. As a consequence, two well-known conjectures in quantum information theory, namely: 1) the entanglement-assisted zero-error capacity of a classical channel is equal to the Lovasz theta function and 2) maximally entangled states and projective measurements are sufficient to achieve the entanglement-assisted zero-error capacity, cannot both be true.

Computing Quantum Channel Capacities

The capacity of noisy quantum channels characterizes the highest rate at which information can be reliably transmitted and it is therefore of practical as well as fundamental importance. Capacities of classical channels are computed using alternating optimization schemes, called Blahut-Arimoto algorithms. In this work, we generalize classical Blahut-Arimoto algorithms to the quantum setting. In particular, we give efficient iterative schemes to compute the capacity of channels with classical input and quantum output, the quantum capacity of less noisy channels, the thermodynamic capacity of quantum channels, as well as the entanglement-assisted capacity of quantum channels. We give rigorous a priori and a posteriori bounds on the estimation error by employing quantum entropy inequalities and demonstrate fast convergence of our algorithms in numerical experiments.

The information capacity of entanglement-assisted continuous variable quantum measurement

The present paper is devoted to the investigation of the entropy reduction and entanglement-assisted classical capacity (information gain) of continuous variable quantum measurements. These quantities are computed explicitly for multimode Gaussian measurement channels. For this we establish a fundamental property of the entropy reduction of a measurement: under a restriction on the second moments of the input state it is maximized by a Gaussian state (providing an analytical expression for the maximum). In the case of one mode, the gain of entanglement assistance is investigated in detail.

Practical Route to Entanglement-Assisted Communication Over Noisy Bosonic Channels

Entanglement offers substantial advantages in quantum information processing, but loss and noise hinder its applications in practical scenarios. Although it has been well known for decades that the classical communication capacity over lossy and noisy bosonic channels can be significantly enhanced by entanglement, no practical encoding and decoding schemes are available to realize any entanglement-enabled advantage. Here, we report structured encoding and decoding schemes for such an entanglement-assisted communication scenario. Specifically, we show that phase encoding on the entangled two-mode squeezed vacuum state saturates the entanglement-assisted classical communication capacity over a very noisy channel and overcomes the fundamental limit of covert communication without entanglement assistance. We then construct receivers for optimum hypothesis testing protocols under discrete phase modulation and for optimum noisy phase estimation protocols under continuous phase modulation. Our results pave the way for entanglement-assisted communication and sensing in the radio-frequency and microwave spectral ranges.

On Converse Bounds for Classical Communication Over Quantum Channels

We explore several new converse bounds for classical communication over quantum channels in both the one-shot and asymptotic regimes. First, we show that the Matthews-Wehner meta-converse bound for entanglement-assisted classical communication can be achieved by activated, no-signalling assisted codes, suitably generalizing a result for classical channels. Second, we derive a new efficiently computable meta-converse on the amount of classical information unassisted codes can transmit over a single use of a quantum channel. As applications, we provide a finite resource analysis of classical communication over quantum erasure channels, including the second-order and moderate deviation asymptotics. Third, we explore the asymptotic analogue of our new meta-converse, the $\Upsilon$-information of the channel. We show that its regularization is an upper bound on the classical capacity, which is generally tighter than the entanglement-assisted capacity and other known efficiently computable strong converse bounds. For covariant channels we show that the $\Upsilon$-information is a strong converse bound.

Quantum informational properties of the Landau–Streater channel

We study the Landau–Streater quantum channel Φ:B(Hd)↦B(Hd), whose Kraus operators are proportional to the irreducible unitary representation of SU(2) generators of dimension d. We establish SU(2) covariance for all d and U(3) covariance for d = 3. Using the theory of angular momentum, we explicitly find the spectrum and the minimal output entropy of Φ. Negative eigenvalues in the spectrum of Φ indicate that the channel cannot be obtained as a result of Hermitian Markovian quantum dynamics. Degradability and antidegradability of the Landau–Streater channel is fully analyzed. We calculate classical and entanglement-assisted capacities of Φ. Quantum capacity of Φ vanishes if d = 2, 3 and is strictly positive if d ⩾ 4. We show that the channel Φ ⊗ Φ does not annihilate entanglement and preserves entanglement of some states with Schmidt rank 2 if d ⩾ 3.

Entanglement-Assisted Classical Communication Over Quantum Channels for Binary Markov Sources

Symbol-based iterative decoding is proposed for the transmission of classical Markov source signals over a quantum channel using a three-stage serial concatenation of a convolutional code (CC), a unity-rate code and a two-qubit superdense (SD) protocol. A modified symbol-based maximum a posteriori algorithm is employed for CC decoding to exploit the Markov source statistics during the iterative decoding process. Extrinsic information transfer chart analysis is performed to evaluate the benefit of the extrinsic mutual information gleaned from the CC decoder for sources with different correlations. We evaluate the bit error rate performance of the proposed coding scheme and compare it with the relevant benchmark schemes, including the turbo coding-based SD scheme. We demonstrate that a near-capacity performance can be achieved using the proposed scheme and when utilizing sources having a high correlation coefficient of $\rho =0.9$ , the proposed coding scheme performs within 0.53 dB from the entanglement-assisted classical capacity.

Separation Between Quantum Lovász Number and Entanglement-Assisted Zero-Error Classical Capacity

Quantum Lov\'asz number is a quantum generalization of the Lov\'asz number in graph theory. It is the best known efficiently computable upper bound of the entanglement-assisted zero-error classical capacity of a quantum channel. However, it remains an intriguing open problem whether quantum entanglement can always enhance the zero-error capacity to achieve the quantum Lov\'asz number. In this paper, by constructing a particular class of qutrit-to-qutrit channels, we show that there exists a strict gap between the entanglement-assisted zero-error capacity and the quantum Lov\'asz number. Interestingly, for this class of quantum channels, the quantum generalization of fractional packing number is strictly larger than the zero-error capacity assisted with feedback or no-signalling correlations, which differs from the case of classical channels.