There have been several upper bounds on the quantum capacity of the single-mode Gaussian channels with thermal noise, such as thermal attenuator and amplifier. We consider a class of attenuator and amplifier with more general noises, including squeezing or even non-Gaussian cases. We introduce new upper bounds on the energy-constrained quantum capacity of those channels by using the conditional quantum entropy power inequality. Also, we obtain lower bounds for the same channels by means of Gaussian optimizer with fixed input entropy. They give narrow bounds when the transmissivity is near unity and the energy of input state is low.
We establish three different upper bounds on the energy-constrained quantum and private capacities of bosonic thermal channels. The first upper which we call the bound, is obtained by decomposing a thermal channel as a pure-loss channel followed by a quantum-limited amplifier channel. We prove that the data-processing can be at most 1.45 bits larger than a known lower on these capacities of the thermal channel. The other two upper bounds, which we call the bound and the bound, are established using the notion of approximate degradability along with energy constraints. A comparison of these three bounds shows that the data-processing is near to a known lower for both low and high thermal noise and is very near to the
ε-close-degradable only for low thermal noise. Moreover, for certain parameter regimes, we show that the
ε-degradable is tighter than all other bounds. All three upper bounds are very near to a known lower for the case of low thermal noise and high transmissivity. We also find improved achievable rates of private communication through bosonic thermal channels, by employing coding schemes that make use of displaced thermal states. We end by proving that an optimal Gaussian input state for the energy-constrained, generalized channel divergence of two particular Gaussian channels is the two-mode squeezed vacuum state that saturates the energy constraint. What remains open for several interesting channel divergences, such as the diamond norm or the R\'enyi channel divergence, is to determine whether, among all input states, a Gaussian state is optimal.
We consider a quantum bosonic channel that couples the input mode via a beam splitter or two-mode squeezer to an environmental mode that is prepared in an arbitrary state. We investigate the classical capacity of this channel, which we call a non-Gaussian attenuator or amplifier channel. If the environment state is thermal, we of course recover a Gaussian phase-covariant channel whose classical capacity is well known. Otherwise, we derive both a lower and an upper bound to the classical capacity of the channel, drawing inspiration from the classical treatment of the capacity of non-Gaussian additive-noise channels. We show that the lower bound to the capacity is always achievable and give examples where the non-Gaussianity of the channel can be exploited so that the communication rate beats the capacity of the Gaussian-equivalent channel (i.e. the channel where the environment state is replaced by a Gaussian state with the same covariance matrix). Finally, our upper bound leads us to formulate and investigate conjectures on the input state that minimizes the output entropy of non-Gaussian attenuator or amplifier channels. Solving these conjectures would be a main step toward accessing the capacity of a large class of non-Gaussian bosonic channels.
The quantum capacity of the bosonic thermal attenuator, which is given by the regularization of its coherent information, is unknown. The seminal work of Holevo and Werner established in 1999 the standard one-use lower bound obtained from input thermal states. We first prove that this long-standing lower bound is the exact supremum over all single-mode Gaussian states and then show that, crucially, a non-Gaussian state can do better. As a consequence, we prove positivity of the quantum capacity in a parameter region where the channel is not antidegradable, yet its coherent information optimized over single-mode Gaussian states vanishes. For example, with one thermal photon in the environment and at transmissivity
η=0.8, the coherent information is non-positive for every single-mode Gaussian input. We give an explicit rank-two non-Gaussian state, supported on only six Fock levels, whose coherent information is certified to be at least
4.7×10−4 qubits per channel use. This short witness is far from numerically optimal: a numerical optimization over fixed non-Gaussian families reaches at least
8.4×10−3 qubits per channel use at the same point. More generally, at
ν=1, using non-Gaussian inputs we certify positivity of the coherent information, and therefore of the quantum capacity, down to
η=0.7841; by contrast, the channel is antidegradable, and hence has zero quantum capacity, for
η≤0.75. Overall, our work identifies new high-noise regimes in which bosonic quantum communication is possible.
We consider a quantum bosonic channel that couples the input mode via a beam splitter or two-mode squeezer to an environmental mode that is prepared in an arbitrary state. We investigate the classical capacity of this channel, which we call a non-Gaussian attenuator or amplifier channel. If the environment state is thermal, we of course recover a Gaussian phase-covariant channel whose classical capacity is well known. Otherwise, we derive both a lower and an upper bound to the classical capacity of the channel, drawing inspiration from the classical treatment of the capacity of non-Gaussian additive-noise channels. We show that the lower bound to the capacity is always achievable and give examples where the non-Gaussianity of the channel can be exploited so that the communication rate beats the capacity of the Gaussian-equivalent channel (i.e. the channel where the environment state is replaced by a Gaussian state with the same covariance matrix). Finally, our upper bound leads us to formulate and investigate conjectures on the input state that minimizes the output entropy of non-Gaussian attenuator or amplifier channels. Solving these conjectures would be a main step toward accessing the capacity of a large class of non-Gaussian bosonic channels.
Thermal attenuator channels model the decoherence of quantum systems interacting with a thermal bath, e.g., a two-level system subject to thermal noise and an electromagnetic signal traveling through a fiber or in free-space. Hence determining the quantum capacity of these channels is an outstanding open problem for quantum computation and communication. Here we derive several upper bounds on the quantum capacity of qubit and bosonic thermal attenuators. We introduce an extended version of such channels which is degradable and hence has a single-letter quantum capacity, bounding that of the original thermal attenuators. Another bound for bosonic attenuators is given by the bottleneck inequality applied to a particular channel decomposition. With respect to previously known bounds we report better results in a broad range of attenuation and noise: we can now approximate the quantum capacity up to a negligible uncertainty for most practical applications, e.g., for low thermal noise.