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arXiv:1605.02294 · IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)

Parallel distinguishability of quantum operations

Runyao Duan, Cheng Guo, Chi-Kwong Li, Yinan Li

Published Jul 1, 2016• 26 citations
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Abstract

We find that the perfect distinguishability of two quantum operations by a parallel scheme depends only on an operator subspace generated from their Choi-Kraus operators. We further show that any operator subspace can be obtained from two quantum operations in such a way. This connection enables us to study the parallel distinguishability of operator subspaces directly without explicitly referring to the underlining quantum operations. We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for the parallel distinguishability of an operator subspace that is either one-dimensional or Hermitian. In both cases the condition is equivalent to the non-existence of positive definite operator in the subspace, and an optimal discrimination protocol is obtained. Finally, we provide more examples to show that the non-existence of positive definite operator is sufficient for many other cases, but in general it is only a necessary condition.

DOI
10.1109/isit.2016.7541701

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We study optimal perfect distinguishability between a unitary and a general quantum operation. In 2-dimensional case we provide a simple sufficient and necessary condition for sequential perfect distinguishability and an analytical formula of optimal query time. We extend the sequential condition to general d-dimensional case. Meanwhile, we provide an upper bound and a lower bound for optimal sequential query time. In the process a new iterative method is given, the most notable innovation of which is its independence to auxiliary systems or entanglement. Following the idea, we further obtain an upper bound and a lower bound of (entanglement-assisted) q-maximal fidelities between a unitary and a quantum operation. Thus by the recursion in [1] an upper bound and a lower bound for optimal general perfect discrimination are achieved. Finally our lower bound result can be extended to the case of arbitrary two quantum operations.
We provide a feasible necessary and sufficient condition for when an unknown quantum operation (quantum device) secretly selected from a set of known quantum operations can be identified perfectly within a finite number of queries, and thus complete the characterization of the perfect distinguishability of quantum operations. We further design an optimal protocol which can achieve the perfect discrimination between two quantum operations by a minimal number of queries. Interestingly, we find that an optimal perfect discrimination between two isometries is always achievable without auxiliary systems or entanglement.
In this paper, we study the distinguishability of multipartite quantum states by separable operations. We first present a necessary and sufficient condition for a finite set of orthogonal quantum states to be distinguishable by separable operations. An analytical version of this condition is derived for the case of(D-1) pure states, whereDis the total dimension of the state space under consideration. A number of interesting consequences of this result are then carefully investigated. Remarkably, we show there exists a large class of 2 otimes 2 separable operations not being realizable by local operations and classical communication. Before our work, only a class of 3 otimes 3 nonlocal separable operations was known [Bennett , Phys. Rev. A 59, 1070 (1999)]. We also show that any basis of the orthogonal complement of a multipartite pure state is indistinguishable by separable operations if and only if this state cannot be a superposition of one or two orthogonal product states, i.e., has an orthogonal Schmidt number not less than three, thus generalize the recent work about indistinguishable bipartite subspaces [Watrous, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 080505 (2005)]. Notably, we obtain an explicit construction of indistinguishable subspaces of dimension 7 (or 6) by considering a composite quantum system consisting of two qutrits (resp., three qubits), which is slightly better than the previously known indistinguishable bipartite subspace with dimension 8.
In this work, the authors consider a homogeneous system of linear equations of the form Aα⊗Nx=0A_\alpha^{\otimes N} \mathbf{x} = 0Aα⊗N​x=0 arising from the distinguishability of two quantum operations by NNN uses in parallel, where the coefficient matrix AαA_\alphaAα​ depends on a real parameter α\alphaα. It was conjectured by Duan et al. that the system has a non-trivial nonnegative solution if and only if α\alphaα lies in a certain interval RNR_NRN​ depending on NNN. The authors affirm the necessity part of the conjecture and establish the sufficiency of the conjecture for N≤10N\leq 10N≤10 by presenting explicit non-trivial nonnegative solutions for the linear system.
Quantum channel discrimination plays a crucial role in quantum information theory. Of particular interest is the case in which the channels can be discriminated perfectly. In this work, we focus on the perfect quantum channel discrimination task in a parallel scheme. We develop an SDP formulation combined with a bisection procedure to compute a quantum state for perfect discrimination in time linear in the number of copies. In addition, we obtain the minimal number of copies of quantum channels to achieve perfect discrimination. Thanks to that, we settle in the affirmative Conjecture 1 of Duan, Guo, Li and Li [arXiv:1605.02294, IEEE ISIT 2016], which characterizes the number of parallel uses needed to discriminate perfectly a distinguished family of operator subspaces. All our results are obtained using the notion and basic properties of the numerical range. In particular, the key fact that we prove and use is that the minimal angle of the numerical range of a tensor product of matrix subspaces equals the sum of the minimal angles of the numerical ranges of the individual subspaces.