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arXiv:0810.0276 · Physical Review Letters

Can Nonprivate Channels Transmit Quantum Information?

Graeme Smith, John A. Smolin

Published Jan 5, 2009• 22 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We study the power of quantum channels with little or no capacity for private communication. Because privacy is a necessary condition for quantum communication, one might expect that such channels would be of little use for transmitting quantum states. Nevertheless, we find strong evidence that there are pairs of such channels that, when used together, can transmit far more quantum information than the sum of their individual private capacities. Because quantum transmissions are necessarily private, this would imply a large violation of additivity for the private capacity. Specifically, we present channels which display either (1) a large joint quantum capacity but very small individual private capacities or (2) a severe violation of additivity for the Holevo information.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.102.010501

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We study the power of quantum channels with little or no capacity for private communication. Because privacy is a necessary condition for quantum communication, one might expect that such channels would be of little use for transmitting quantum states. Nevertheless, we find strong evidence that there are pairs of such channels that, when used together, can transmit far more quantum information than the sum of their individual private capacities. Because quantum transmissions are necessarily private, this would imply a large violation of additivity for the private capacity. Specifically, we present channels which display either (1) a large joint quantum capacity but very small individual private capacities or (2) a severe violation of additivity for the Holevo information.
Privacy is a fundamental feature of quantum mechanics. A coherently transmitted quantum state is inherently private. Remarkably, coherent quantum communication is not a prerequisite for privacy: there are quantum channels that are too noisy to transmit any quantum information reliably that can nevertheless send private classical information. Here, we ask how much private classical information a channel can transmit if it has little quantum capacity. We present a class of channels N(d) with input dimension d(2), quantum capacity Q(N(d)) ≤ 1, and private capacity P(N(d)) = log d. These channels asymptotically saturate an interesting inequality P(N) ≤ (1/2)[log d(A) + Q(N)] for any channel N with input dimension d(A) and capture the essence of privacy stripped of the confounding influence of coherence.
Private communication over a noisy quantum channel requires reliable transmission to the receiver and secrecy from the environment. Whether two channels with zero private capacity can jointly enable private communication is a longstanding open problem in quantum information theory. Here we resolve this problem by exhibiting a four-level channel and a qubit erasure channel with half erasure probability, each with zero private capacity, whose joint use achieves more than 0.0001903 private bits per product use. The encoding gives the receiver a linear information gain with at most quadratic environmental leakage, enabling privacy through a fixed joint measurement and classical coding. This superactivation, impossible for independent classical memoryless wiretap channels, shows that a channel's private capacity alone does not determine its value for secure communication. The initial activation example was identified through interactions with large language models, and the result has been formalized in Lean 4.
Quantum information theory establishes the ultimate limits on communication and cryptography in terms of channel capacities for various types of information. The private capacity is particularly important because it quantifies achievable rates of quantum key distribution. We study the power of quantum channels with limited private capacity, focusing on channels that dephase in random bases. These display extensive nonadditivity of private capacity: a channel with 2logd input qubits that has a private capacity less than 2, but when used together with a second channel with zero private capacity, the joint capacity jumps to (1/2)logd. In contrast to earlier work which found nonadditivity vanishing as a fraction of input size or conditional on unproven mathematical assumptions, this provides a natural setting manifesting nonadditivity of privacy of the strongest possible sort.
A channel capacity quantifies the communication capability of a noisy physical process. In contrast to communication channels in the classical world, quantum theory makes this capability contextual. We show that two Pauli two-qubit channels, each with zero private classical capacity, can be used to transmit private information when used together. One is a two-qubit Pauli channel whose environment can reconstruct the receiver output up to matrix transposition; the other is an antidegradable channel. We obtain a similar result when the second channel is the 50% qubit erasure channel. A simple binary code built from rank-three mixtures of Bell states activates private communication. The main ingredient in our construction is a transpose-antidegradable channel that is not antidegradable.
A quantum communication channel can be put to many uses: it can transmit classical information, private classical information, or quantum information. It can be used alone, with shared entanglement, or together with other channels. For each of these settings there is a capacity that quantifies a channel's potential for communication. In this short review, I summarize what is known about the various capacities of a quantum channel, including a discussion of the relevant additivity questions. I also give some indication of potentially interesting directions for future research.
A formula for the capacity of a quantum channel for transmitting private classical information is derived. This is shown to be equal to the capacity of the channel for generating a secret key, and neither capacity is enhanced by forward public classical communication. Motivated by the work of Schumacher and Westmoreland on quantum privacy and quantum coherence, parallels between private classical information and quantum information are exploited to obtain an expression for the capacity of a quantum channel for generating pure bipartite entanglement. The latter implies a new proof of the quantum channel coding theorem and a simple proof of the converse. The coherent information plays a role in all of the above mentioned capacities