This paper studies the difficulty of discriminating between an arbitrary quantum channel and a “replacer" channel that discards its input and replaces it with a fixed state. The results obtained here generalize those known in the theory of quantum hypothesis testing for binary state discrimination. We show that, in this particular setting, the most general adaptive discrimination strategies provide no asymptotic advantage over non-adaptive tensor-power strategies. This conclusion follows by proving a quantum Stein’s lemma for this channel discrimination setting, showing that a constant bound on the Type I error leads to the Type II error decreasing to zero exponentially quickly at a rate determined by the maximum relative entropy registered between the channels. The strong converse part of the lemma states that any attempt to make the Type II error decay to zero at a rate faster than the channel relative entropy implies that the Type I error necessarily converges to one. We then refine this latter result by identifying the optimal strong converse exponent for this task. As a consequence of these results, we can establish a strong converse theorem for the quantum-feedback-assisted capacity of a channel, sharpening a result due to Bowen. Furthermore, our channel discrimination result demonstrates the asymptotic optimality of a non-adaptive tensor-power strategy in the setting of quantum illumination, as was used in prior work on the topic. The sandwiched Rényi relative entropy is a key tool in our analysis. Finally, by combining our results with recent results of Hayashi and Tomamichel, we find a novel operational interpretation of the mutual information of a quantum channel N as the optimal Type II error exponent when discriminating between a large number of independent instances of N and an arbitrary “worst-case” replacer channel chosen from the set of all replacer channels.
We determine the optimal success probability for transmitting a fixed number of classical messages through a finite number of uses of the quantum erasure channel, assisted by noiseless classical feedback and without initial shared entanglement. For an input dimension
d, an erasure probability
p, a blocklength
n, and
M equiprobable messages, the optimal success probability is equal to
E[min{1,dK/M}], where
K is binomial with parameters
n and
1−p. The converse allows arbitrary adaptive quantum encoders, quantum memories, and receiver instruments. Its main ingredient is an elementary dimension bound for noiseless quantum communication with classical feedback, proved by fixing the classical controls without conditioning the sender's state on the observed transcript. A classical protocol that transmits the base-
d digits of an integer representing the message, repeating each digit until the receiver acknowledges its reception or the prescribed blocklength is reached, attains the bound for every integer
M. We also establish a relative-majorization property of erasure-channel outputs and exactly evaluate a hypothesis-testing converse, recovering the same numerical bound without feedback. That converse need not be achievable without feedback: four uses of the qubit erasure channel and four messages give a strict gap. A product-state code employing tetrahedral qubit states nevertheless outperforms every classical binary erasure code with these parameters. We give an explicit message-size formula and show that the bounded-remainder normal approximation and the average-success strong-converse exponent are unchanged without feedback. We also determine the feedback-assisted error exponent below capacity, prove that it agrees with the no-feedback exponent above a critical rate, and give no-feedback bounds at lower rates.
We determine the exact strong converse exponent for entanglement-assisted classical communication of a quantum channel. Our main contribution is the derivation of an upper bound for the strong converse exponent which is characterized by the sandwiched Rényi divergence. It turns out that this upper bound coincides with the lower bound of Gupta and Wilde (Commun. Math. Phys. 334:867-887, 2015). Thus, the strong converse exponent follows from the combination of these two bounds. Our result has two implications. Firstly, it implies that the exponential bound for the strong converse property of quantum-feedback-assisted classical communication, derived by Cooney, Mosonyi and Wilde (Commun. Math. Phys. 344:797-829, 2016), is optimal. This answers their open question in the affirmative. Hence, we have determined the exact strong converse exponent for this problem as well. Secondly, due to an observation of Leung and Matthews, it can be easily extended to deal with the transmission of quantum information under the assistance of entanglement or quantum feedback, yielding similar results. The above findings provide, for the first time, a complete operational interpretation to the channel’s sandwiched Rényi information of order α > 1.