The basic entanglement swapping protocol allows to achieve the main aim of deterministically projecting two qubits, which have never interacted, onto a maximally entangled state. For deterministic swapping the key ingredient is the maximal entanglement initially contained in two pairs of qubits and the ability to measure onto a Bell basis. In other words, the basic and deterministic entanglement swapping scheme involves three maximal level of entanglement. In this work we address probabilistic entanglement swapping processes performed with different amounts of initial entanglement. Besides, we suggest a non Bell measuring-basis, thus we introduce a third entanglement level in the process. Additionally, we propose the \emph{unambiguous state extraction} scheme as the local mechanism for probabilistically achieving the main aim. Amalgamating these three elements allows us to design four strategies for performing probabilistic entanglement swapping. Surprisingly, we encountered an twofold entanglement matching effect related to the concurrence of the measuring-basis. Specifically, the maximal probability of accomplishing the main aim becomes a constant for concurrences higher than or equal to the matching entanglement values. Thus, we show that maximal entanglement in the measuring-basis is not required for attaining the main aim with optimal probability.
Quantum channel discrimination is a fundamental task in quantum information processing. In the one-shot regime, discrimination between two candidate channels is characterized by the diamond norm. Beyond this basic setting, however, many scenarios in distributed quantum information processing remain unresolved, motivating notions of distinguishability that capture the power of the available resources. In this work, we formulate a theory of testers for bipartite channel discrimination, leading to the concept of the entanglement cost of bipartite channel discrimination: the minimum Schmidt rank
k of a shared maximally entangled state required for local protocols to achieve the globally optimal success probability. We introduce
k-injectable testers as a tester-based description of entanglement-assisted local discrimination and, in particular, study the class of
k-injectable positive-partial-transpose (PPT) testers, which constitutes a numerically tractable relaxation of the practically relevant class of LOCC testers.
For every
k, we derive a semidefinite program (SDP) for the optimal success probability, which in turn yields an efficiently computable one-shot PPT entanglement cost. To render these optimization problems numerically feasible, we prove a symmetry-reduction principle for covariant channel pairs, thereby reducing the effective dimension of the associated SDPs. Finally, by dualizing the SDP, we derive bounds on the composite channel-discrimination problem and illustrate our framework with proof-of-principle examples based on the depolarizing channel, the depolarized SWAP channel, and the Werner--Holevo channels.
We investigate the problem of teleporting unknown qudit states via pure quantum channels with nonmaximal Schmidt rank. This process is mapped to the problem of discriminating among nonorthogonal symmetric states which are linearly dependent and equally likely. It is shown that by applying an optimized maximum-confidence (MC) measurement for accomplishing this task, one reaches the maximum possible teleportation fidelity after a conclusive event in the discrimination process, which in turn occurs with the maximum success probability. In this case, such fidelity depends only on the Schmidt rank of the channel and it is larger than the optimal one achieved, deterministically, by the standard teleportation protocol. Furthermore, we show that there are quantum channels for which it is possible to apply a
k-stage sequential MC measurement in the discrimination process such that a conclusive event at any stage leads to a teleportation fidelity above the aforementioned optimal one and, consequently, increases the overall success probability of teleportation with a fidelity above this limit.
Entanglement is known to be a powerful resource that improves performance in various quantum information and computational tasks. A standard example of such a phenomenon is the possibility of perfectly discriminating all four Pauli operations in a single shot via the superdense coding protocol. While entanglement is often a powerful resource for quantum channel discrimination, this is not necessarily the case. In this work, we identify scenarios in which the maximally entangled state is a bad choice of input state and, more generally, show that excessive entanglement can reduce channel discriminability dramatically. To do so, we present an explicit pair of unitary channels which are perfectly discriminable without entanglement, but for which any strategy with maximally entangled input states is
ε-close to a blind uniform guessing strategy. To develop a systematic approach, we introduce the concepts of Maximal Entanglement Worst Case (MEWC) and Maximal Entanglement Best Case (MEBC) pairs of channels, and present conditions for a pair of channels to be MEWC or MEBC. With these conditions, we show that the optimal input states for discriminating MEWC pairs of channels are necessarily separable, and provide non-trivial examples of measurement channels for which entanglement necessarily reduces the maximum probability of discrimination.