Unlimited Entanglement Research Articles

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.

Channel Simulation in Quantum Metrology

Abstract In this review we discuss how channel simulation can be used to simplify the most general protocols of quantum parameter estimation, where unlimited entanglement and adaptive joint operations may be employed. Whenever the unknown parameter encoded in a quantum channel is completely transferred in an environmental program state simulating the channel, the optimal adaptive estimation cannot beat the standard quantum limit. In this setting, we elucidate the crucial role of quantum teleportation as a primitive operation which allows one to completely reduce adaptive protocols over suitable teleportation-covariant channels and derive matching upper and lower bounds for parameter estimation. For these channels,wemay express the quantum Cramér Rao bound directly in terms of their Choi matrices. Our review considers both discrete- and continuous-variable systems, also presenting some new results for bosonic Gaussian channels using an alternative sub-optimal simulation. It is an open problem to design simulations for quantum channels that achieve the Heisenberg limit.

Ultimate Precision of Adaptive Noise Estimation.

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.

Quantum XOR Games

We introduce quantum XOR games, a model of two-player, one-round games that extends the model of XOR games by allowing the referee’s questions to the players to be quantum states. We give examples showing that quantum XOR games exhibit a wide range of behaviors that are known not to exist for standard XOR games, such as cases in which the use of entanglement leads to an arbitrarily large advantage over the use of no entanglement. By invoking two deep extensions of Grothendieck’s inequality, we present an efficient algorithm that gives a constant-factor approximation to the best performance that players can obtain in a given game, both in the case that they have no shared entanglement and that they share unlimited entanglement. As a byproduct of the algorithm, we prove some additional interesting properties of quantum XOR games, such as the fact that sharing a maximally entangled state of arbitrary dimension gives only a small advantage over having no entanglement at all.

On the Power of Quantum, One Round, Two Prover Interactive Proof Systems

We analyze quantum two prover round interactive proof systems, in which noninteracting provers can share unlimited entanglement. The maximum acceptance probability is characterized as a superoperator norm. We get some partial results and in particular we analyze the rank one case.

Communication cost of entanglement transformations

We study the amount of communication needed for two parties to transform some given joint pure state into another one, either exactly or with some fidelity. Specifically, we present a method to lower bound this communication cost even when the amount of entanglement does not increase. Moreover, the bound applies even if the initial state is supplemented with unlimited entanglement in the form of EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) pairs and the communication is allowed to be quantum mechanical. We then apply the method to the determination of the communication cost of asymptotic entanglement concentration and dilution. While concentration is known to require no communication whatsoever, the best known protocol for dilution, discovered by H.-K. Lo and S. Popescu [Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 1459 (1999)], requires exchange of a number of bits that is of the order of the square root of the number of EPR pairs. Here we prove a matching lower bound of the same asymptotic order, demonstrating the optimality of the Lo-Popescu protocol up to a constant factor and establishing the existence of a fundamental asymmetry between the concentration and dilution tasks. We also discuss states for which the minimal communication cost is proportional to their entanglement, such as the states recently introduced in the context of ``embezzling entanglement'' (W. van Dam and P. Hayden, e-print quant-ph/0201041).