Although the no-cloning theorem forbids perfect replication of quantum information, it is sometimes possible to produce large numbers of replicas with vanishingly small error. This phenomenon, known as quantum superreplication, can occur for both quantum states and quantum gates. The aim of this paper is to review the central features of quantum superreplication and provide a unified view of existing results. The paper also includes new results. In particular, we show that when quantum superreplication can be achieved, it can be achieved through estimation up to an error of size O(M/N 2), where N and M are the number of input and output copies, respectively. Quantum strategies still offer an advantage for superreplication in that they allow for exponentially faster reduction of the error. Using the relation with estimation, we provide i) an alternative proof of the optimality of Heisenberg scaling in quantum metrology, ii) a strategy for estimating arbitrary unitary gates with a mean square error scaling as log N/N 2, and iii) a protocol that generates O(N 2) nearly perfect copies of a generic pure state U |0〉 while using the corresponding gate U only N times. Finally, we point out that superreplication can be achieved using interactions among k systems, provided that k is large compared to M 2/N 2.
Quantum states obey an asymptotic no-cloning theorem, stating that no deterministic machine can reliably replicate generic sequences of identically prepared pure states. In stark contrast, we show that generic sequences of unitary gates can be replicated deterministically at nearly quadratic rates, with an error vanishing on most inputs except for an exponentially small fraction. The result is not in contradiction with the no-cloning theorem, since the impossibility of deterministically transforming pure states into unitary gates prevents the application of the gate replication protocol to states. In addition to gate replication, we show that N parallel uses of a completely unknown unitary gate can be compressed into a single gate acting on O(log_{2}N) qubits, leading to an exponential reduction of the amount of quantum communication needed to implement the gate remotely.
The no-cloning theorem is a cornerstone result in quantum mechanics that forbids copying of general quantum information. More quantitatively, even given
N copies of an unknown state, any channel producing an
(N+1)-copy state incurs a nonzero trace-distance error on some inputs. Turning this around, one can ask about the sample complexity of approximate
N→N+1 cloning: for a desired small error
ε, what
N suffices? For arbitrary pure states on a Hilbert space
H, the answer is
N≃dimH/ε - astronomically large for most
H of interest. What if the input is promised to lie in a structured family? We examine a range of families fundamental to many-body physics and quantum information:
n-mode fermionic Gaussian and Slater states,
n-mode bosonic Gaussian states, and qudit phase states. For fermions, we construct optimal cloning channels, reducing the complexity from exponential to polynomial in
n. For bosonic Gaussian states, we construct an explicit cloner that certifies polynomial complexity, without any constraint on the energy of the state; this channel, however, is not optimal in general. The fermionic and bosonic results follow from a single representation-theoretic framework, which generalizes previous work by Werner and by Chiribella and Yang; it also yields the cloners' unitary implementation. Furthermore, we explain why for many families the cloning complexity is linear in the dimension of the family manifold, via a controlled saddle-point evaluation of the frame potential at high
N. The same calculation accounts for the analogous scaling of tomography complexity. The above framework does not cover phase states; for these we give an independent construction of a channel with optimal cloning fidelity. Our work complements recent results on cloning stabilizer states.
We experimentally demonstrate the underlying physical mechanism of the recently proposed protocol for superreplication of quantum phase gates [W. D\"ur, P. Sekatski, and M. Skotiniotis, Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 120503 (2015)], which allows producing up to
N2 high-fidelity replicas from
N input copies in the limit of large
N. Our implementation of $1\ensuremath{\rightarrow}2$ replication of the single-qubit phase gates is based on linear optics and qubits encoded into states of single photons. We employ the quantum Toffoli gate to imprint information about the structure of an input two-qubit state onto an auxiliary qubit, apply the replicated operation to the auxiliary qubit, and then disentangle the auxiliary qubit from the other qubits by a suitable quantum measurement. We characterize the replication protocol by full quantum process tomography and observe good agreement of the experimental results with theory.
We consider the problem of deterministically cloning quantum channels with respect to the best attainable rate and the highest quality, so-called optimal cloning. We demonstrate that cloning quantum states is, in-fact, equivalent to cloning the trash-and-replace channel and therefore the former is a special case of the more general problem. By appealing to higher-order quantum operations (quantum processes) we construct a unified framework to deal with the most general cloning tasks and establish necessary conditions for a family of channels to exhibit super-replication -- a quadratic cloning rate with vanishing error. We find that noisy phase-gate channels satisfy these conditions, and we construct the explicit super-replicating process for the task. Conversely, we find that the criteria are not met by the full set of noisy unitary gates; classical noise channels; or amplitude damping channels, whose respective cloning rates are at most linear. In this paradigm, we not only derive new results, but also refigure known ones. We derive a strong converse for state cloning, and for unitary channels we construct an alternative super-replication process to that of Dür et al. [PRL 114, 120503 (2015)] and Chiribella et al. [PRL 114, 120504 (2015)] based on a measure-and-prepare process, which allows us to establish a direct connection between optimal channel cloning and Bayesian channel estimation. Finally we give an SDP algorithm to search for optimal cloning processes and study the advantage of coherent vs measure-and-prepare protocols on concrete examples.
We show that one can deterministically generate, out of N copies of an unknown unitary operation, up to N^{2} almost perfect copies. The result holds for all operations generated by a Hamiltonian with an unknown interaction strength. This generalizes a similar result in the context of phase-covariant cloning where, however, superreplication comes at the price of an exponentially reduced probability of success. We also show that multiple copies of unitary operations can be emulated by operations acting on a much smaller space, e.g., a magnetic field acting on a single n-level system allows one to emulate the action of the field on n^{2} qubits.
While the no-cloning theorem, which forbids the perfect copying of quantum states, is well-known as one of the defining features of quantum mechanics, the question of how well the theory allows a state to be cloned is yet to be completely solved. In this paper, rigorous solutions to the problem of
M→N asymmetric cloning of qudits are obtained in a number of interesting cases. The central result is the solution to the
1→N universal asymmetric qudit cloning problem for which the exact trade-off in the fidelities of the clones for every
N and
d is derived. Analogous results are proven for qubits when
M=N−1. We also consider state-dependent
1→N qubit cloning, providing a general parametrization in terms of a Heisenberg star Hamiltonian. In all instances, we determine the feasibility of implementing the cloning economically, i.e., without an ancilla, and determine the dimension of the ancilla when an economic implementation is not possible.