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arXiv:0908.0119 · Physical Review Letters

Perfect Distinguishability of Quantum Operations

Runyao Duan, Yuan Feng, Mingsheng Ying

Published Nov 20, 2009• 126 citations
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Abstract

We provide a feasible necessary and sufficient condition for when an unknown quantum operation (quantum device) secretly selected from a set of known quantum operations can be identified perfectly within a finite number of queries, and thus complete the characterization of the perfect distinguishability of quantum operations. We further design an optimal protocol which can achieve the perfect discrimination between two quantum operations by a minimal number of queries. Interestingly, we find that an optimal perfect discrimination between two isometries is always achievable without auxiliary systems or entanglement.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.103.210501

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We provide a feasible necessary and sufficient condition for when an unknown quantum operation (quantum device) secretly selected from a set of known quantum operations can be identified perfectly within a finite number of queries, and thus complete the characterization of the perfect distinguishability of quantum operations. We further design an optimal protocol which can achieve the perfect discrimination between two quantum operations by a minimal number of queries. Interestingly, we find that an optimal perfect discrimination between two isometries is always achievable without auxiliary systems or entanglement.
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We prove a lower bound on the qqq-maximal fidelities between two quantum channels $\E_0$ and $\E_1$ and an upper bound on the qqq-maximal fidelities between a quantum channel $\E$ and an identity $\I$. Then we apply these two bounds to provide a simple sufficient and necessary condition for sequential perfect distinguishability between $\E$ and $\I$ and provide both a lower bound and an upper bound on the minimum number of queries required to sequentially perfectly discriminating $\E$ and $\I$. Interestingly, in the 222-dimensional case, both bounds coincide. Based on the optimal perfect discrimination protocol presented in \cite{DFY09}, we can further generalize the lower bound and upper bound to the minimum number of queries to perfectly discriminating $\E$ and III over all possible discrimination schemes. Finally the two lower bounds are shown remain working for perfectly discriminating general two quantum channels $\E_0$ and $\E_1$ in sequential scheme and over all possible discrimination schemes respectively.
We find that the perfect distinguishability of two quantum operations by a parallel scheme depends only on an operator subspace generated from their Choi-Kraus operators. We further show that any operator subspace can be obtained from two quantum operations in such a way. This connection enables us to study the parallel distinguishability of operator subspaces directly without explicitly referring to the underlining quantum operations. We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for the parallel distinguishability of an operator subspace that is either one-dimensional or Hermitian. In both cases the condition is equivalent to the non-existence of positive definite operator in the subspace, and an optimal discrimination protocol is obtained. Finally, we provide more examples to show that the non-existence of positive definite operator is sufficient for many other cases, but in general it is only a necessary condition.
The problem studied in this paper is, if the number of queries to unitary operations is fixed, say kkk, then when do local operations and classical communication (LOCC) suffice for optimally distinguishing bipartite unitary operations? We consider the above problem for two-qubit unitary operations in the case of k=1k=1k=1, showing that for two two-qubit entangling unitary operations without local parties, LOCC achieves the same distinguishability as the global operations. Specifically, we obtain the following: (i) if such two unitary operations are perfectly distinguishable by global operations, then they are perfectly distinguishable by LOCC also, and (ii) if they are not perfectly distinguishable by global operations, then LOCC can achieve the same optimal discrimination probability as the global operations.