We initiate the study of passive environment-assisted communication via a quantum channel, modeled as a unitary interaction between the information carrying system and an environment. In this model, the environment is controlled by a benevolent helper, who can set its initial state such as to assist sender and receiver of the communication link (the case of a malicious environment, also known as jammer, or arbitrarily varying channel, is essentially well-understood and comprehensively reviewed). Here, after setting out precise definitions, focusing on the problem of quantum communication, we show that entanglement plays a crucial role in this problem: indeed, the environment-assisted capacity where the helper is restricted to product states between the channel uses is different from the one with unrestricted helper. Furthermore, prior shared entanglement between the helper and the receiver makes a difference, too.
We initiate the study of passive environment-assisted communication via a quantum channel, modeled as a unitary interaction between the information carrying system and an environment. In this model, the environment is controlled by a benevolent helper, who can set its initial state such as to assist sender and receiver of the communication link (the case of a malicious environment, also known as jammer, or arbitrarily varying channel, is essentially well-understood and comprehensively reviewed). Here, after setting out precise definitions, focusing on the problem of quantum communication, we show that entanglement plays a crucial role in this problem: indeed, the environment-assisted capacity where the helper is restricted to product states between the channel uses is different from the one with unrestricted helper. Furthermore, prior shared entanglement between the helper and the receiver makes a difference, too.
INFORMATION SCIENCE AND COMPLEX SYSTEMS SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Doctor of Philosophy On environment-assisted capacities of a quantum channel by Siddharth Karumanchi We initiate the study of passive environment-assisted communication via a quantum channel, modeled as a unitary interaction between the information carrying system and an environment. In this model, the environment is controlled by a benevolent helper who can set its initial state such as to assist sender and receiver of the communication link. Here, after setting out precise definitions, focussing on the problem of quantum and classical communication, we show that entanglement plays a crucial role in this problem: indeed, the assisted capacity where the helper is restricted to product states between channel uses is different from the one with unrestricted helper. Also, prior shared entanglement between the helper and the receiver makes a difference, too. Furthermore, a scenario where there is classical communication between sender and helper (making them conferencing encoders) is discussed. We find interesting phenomenon like super-activation, super-additivity and establish non-zero lower bounds for the classical capacity with conferencing encoders.
A quantum channel physically is a unitary interaction between an information carrying system and an environment, which is initialized in a pure state before the interaction. Conventionally, this state, as also the parameters of the interaction, is assumed to be fixed and known to the sender and receiver. Here, following the model introduced by us earlier [1], we consider a benevolent third party, i.e., a helper, controlling the environment state, and show how the helper’s presence changes the communication game. In particular, we define and study the classical capacity of a unitary interaction with helper, in two variants: one where the helper can only prepare separable states across many channel uses, and one without this restriction. Furthermore, two even more powerful scenarios of pre-shared entanglement between helper and receiver, and of classical communication between sender and helper (making them conferencing encoders) are considered.
Passive environment-assisted communication takes place via a quantum channel modeled as a unitary interaction between the information carrying system and an environment, where the latter is controlled by a passive helper, who can set its initial state such as to assist sender and receiver, but not help actively by adjusting her behaviour depending on the message. Here we investigate the information transmission capabilities in this framework by considering Gaussian unitaries acting on Bosonic systems. We consider both quantum communication and classical communication with helper, as well as classical communication with free classical coordination between sender and helper (conferencing encoders). Concerning quantum communication, we prove general coding theorems with and without energy constraints, yielding multi-letter (regularized) expressions. In the search for cases where the capacity formula is computable, we look for Gaussian unitaries that are universally degradable or anti-degradable. However, we show that no Gaussian unitary yields either a degradable or anti-degradable channel for all environment states. On the other hand, restricting to Gaussian environment states, results in universally degradable unitaries, for which we thus can give single-letter quantum capacity formulas. Concerning classical communication, we prove a general coding theorem for the classical capacity under an energy constraint, given by a multi-letter expression. Furthermore, we derive an uncertainty-type relation between the classical capacities of the sender and the helper, helped respectively by the other party, showing a lower bound on the sum of the two capacities. Then, this is used to lower bound the classical information transmission rate in the scenario of classical communication between sender and helper.
If a sender and a receiver lack precise knowledge about the communication line that connects them, designing a scheme to reliably transmit information becomes more challenging. This has been studied in classical and quantum information theory in the context of compound channel models and arbitrarily varying channel models. However, a fully quantum version of system uncertainty allows for an even more challenging coding scenario with entangled channel uses. This type of model has previously been investigated for classical and quantum capacity. Here, we address the problem of entanglement-assisted capacity in the presence of such system uncertainty. We find that, under the assumption of a finite environment dimension, it is equal to a corresponding compound capacity. Intriguingly, our results imply that in certain fully quantum arbitrarily varying channel models, the entanglement-assisted capacity can be positive while the classical capacity is equal to zero, a phenomenon that does not occur in regular single-channel coding.
We study universal quantum codes for entanglement-assisted quantum communication over compound quantum channels. In this setting, sender and receiver do not know the specific channel that will be used for communication, but only know the set that the channel is selected from. We investigate different variations of the problem: uninformed users, informed receiver, informed sender, and feedback assistance. We derive single-letter formulas for all corresponding channel capacities. Our proofs are based on one-shot decoupling bounds and properties of smooth entropies.
Following initial work by Gregoratti and Werner [J. Mod. Optics 50, 913-933, 2003 and quant-ph/0403092] and Hayden and King [quant-ph/0409026], we study the problem of the capacity of a quantum channel assisted by a "friendly (channel) environment" that can locally measure and communicate classical messages to the receiver. Previous work [quant-ph/0505038] has yielded a capacity formula for the quantum capacity under this kind of help from the environment. Here we study the problem of the environment-assisted classical capacity, which exhibits a somewhat richer structure (at least, it seems to be the harder problem). There are several, presumably inequivalent, models of the permitted local operations and classical communications between receiver and environment: one-way, arbitrary, separable and PPT POVMs. In all these models, the task of decoding a message amounts to discriminating a set of possibly entangled states between the two receivers, by a class of operations under some sort of locality constraint. After introducing the operational capacities outlined above, we show that a lower bound on the environment-assisted classical capacity is always half the logarithm of the input space dimension. Then we develop a few techniques to prove the existence of channels which meet this lower bound up to terms of much smaller order, even when PPT decoding measurements are allowed (assuming a certain superadditivity conjecture).