The Quantum Reverse Shannon Theorem states that any quantum channel can be simulated by an unlimited amount of shared entanglement and an amount of classical communication equal to the channel’s entanglement assisted classical capacity. In this paper, we provide a new proof of this theorem, which has previously been proved by Bennett, Devetak, Harrow, Shor, and Winter. Our proof has a clear structure being based on two recent information-theoretic results: one-shot Quantum State Merging and the Post-Selection Technique for quantum channels.
The Quantum Reverse Shannon Theorem states that any quantum channel can be simulated by an unlimited amount of shared entanglement and an amount of classical communication equal to the channel’s entanglement assisted classical capacity. In this paper, we provide a new proof of this theorem, which has previously been proved by Bennett, Devetak, Harrow, Shor, and Winter. Our proof has a clear structure being based on two recent information-theoretic results: one-shot Quantum State Merging and the Post-Selection Technique for quantum channels.
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 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 postselection technique for quantum channels, and it uses techniques developed for the quantum reverse Shannon theorem.
Dual to the usual noisy channel coding problem, where a noisy (classical or quantum) channel is used to simulate a noiseless one, reverse Shannon theorems concern the use of noiseless channels to simulate noisy ones, and more generally the use of one noisy channel to simulate another. For channels of nonzero capacity, this simulation is always possible, but for it to be efficient, auxiliary resources of the proper kind and amount are generally required. In the classical case, shared randomness between sender and receiver is a sufficient auxiliary resource, regardless of the nature of the source, but in the quantum case the requisite auxiliary resources for efficient simulation depend on both the channel being simulated, and the source from which the channel inputs are coming. For tensor power sources (the quantum generalization of classical IID sources), entanglement in the form of standard ebits (maximally entangled pairs of qubits) is sufficient, but for general sources, which may be arbitrarily correlated or entangled across channel inputs, additional resources, such as entanglement-embezzling states or backward communication, are generally needed. Combining existing and new results, we establish the amounts of communication and auxiliary resources needed in both the classical and quantum cases, the tradeoffs among them, and the loss of simulation efficiency when auxiliary resources are absent or insufficient. In particular we find a new single-letter expression for the excess forward communication cost of coherent feedback simulations of quantum channels (i.e. simulations in which the sender retains what would escape into the environment in an ordinary simulation), on non-tensor-power sources in the presence of unlimited ebits but no other auxiliary resource. Our results on tensor power sources establish a strong converse to the entanglement-assisted capacity theorem.
We revisit the quantum reverse Shannon theorem, a central result in quantum information theory that characterizes the resources needed to simulate quantum channels when entanglement is freely available. We derive a universal additive upper bound on the smoothed max-information in terms of the sandwiched Rényi mutual information. This bound yields tighter single-shot results, eliminates the need for the post-selection technique, and leads to a conceptually simpler proof of the quantum reverse Shannon theorem. By consolidating and streamlining earlier approaches, our result provides a clearer and more direct understanding of the resource costs of simulating quantum channels.
Dual to the usual noisy channel coding problem, where a noisy (classical or quantum) channel is used to simulate a noiseless one, reverse Shannon theorems concern the use of noiseless channels to simulate noisy ones, and more generally the use of one noisy channel to simulate another. For channels of nonzero capacity, this simulation is always possible, but for it to be efficient, auxiliary resources of the proper kind and amount are generally required. In the classical case, shared randomness between sender and receiver is a sufficient auxiliary resource, regardless of the nature of the source, but in the quantum case, the requisite auxiliary resources for efficient simulation depend on both the channel being simulated, and the source from which the channel inputs are coming. For tensor power sources (the quantum generalization of classical memoryless sources), entanglement in the form of standard ebits (maximally entangled pairs of qubits) is sufficient, but for general sources, which may be arbitrarily correlated or entangled across channel inputs, additional resources, such as entanglement-embezzling states or backward communication, are generally needed. Combining existing and new results, we establish the amounts of communication and auxiliary resources needed in both the classical and quantum cases, the tradeoffs among them, and the loss of simulation efficiency when auxiliary resources are absent or insufficient. In particular, we find a new single-letter expression for the excess forward communication cost of coherent feedback simulations of quantum channels (i.e., simulations in which the sender retains what would escape into the environment in an ordinary simulation), on nontensor-power sources in the presence of unlimited ebits but no other auxiliary resource. Our results on tensor power sources establish a strong converse to the entanglement-assisted capacity theorem.
The entanglement cost of a quantum channel is the minimal rate at which entanglement (between sender and receiver) is needed in order to simulate many copies of a quantum channel in the presence of free classical communication. In this paper, we show how to express this quantity as a regularized optimization of the entanglement formation over states that can be generated between sender and receiver. Our formula is the channel analog of a well-known formula for the entanglement cost of quantum states in terms of the entanglement of formation and shares a similar relation to the recently shattered hope for additivity. The entanglement cost of a quantum channel can be seen as the analog of the quantum reverse Shannon theorem in the case where free classical communication is allowed. The techniques used in the proof of our result are then also inspired by a recent proof of the quantum reverse Shannon theorem and feature the one-shot formalism for quantum information theory, the postselection technique for quantum channels as well as Sion's minimax theorem. We discuss two applications of our result. First, we are able to link the security in the noisy-storage model to a problem of sending quantum rather than classical information through the adversary's storage device. This not only improves the range of parameters where security can be shown, but also allows us to prove security for storage devices for which no results were known before. Second, our result has consequences for the study of the strong converse quantum capacity. Here, we show that any coding scheme that sends quantum information through a quantum channel at a rate larger than the entanglement cost of the channel has an exponentially small fidelity.
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. Our proof is based on quantum-proof randomness extractors and the post-selection technique for quantum channels [Christandl et al., PRL 102 (020504), 2009].