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arXiv:1912.02330 · Physical Review A

Local approximation of multipartite quantum measurements

Scott M. Cohen

Published Feb 14, 2022• 3 citations
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Abstract

We provide a necessary condition that a quantum measurement can be implemented by the class of protocols known as local operations and classical communication, or LOCC, including when an error is allowed but must vanish in the limit of an infinite number of rounds, a case referred to as asymptotic LOCC. Our condition unifies, extends, and provides an intuitive, geometric justification for previous results on asymptotic LOCC. We use our condition to answer a variety of long-standing, unsolved problems, including for distinguishability of certain sets of states by LOCC. These include various classes of unextendible product bases, for which we prove they cannot be distinguished by LOCC even when infinite resources are available and an asymptotically vanishing error is allowed.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.105.022207

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We provide a necessary condition that a quantum measurement can be implemented by the class of protocols known as local operations and classical communication, or LOCC, including when an error is allowed but must vanish in the limit of an infinite number of rounds, a case referred to as asymptotic LOCC. Our condition unifies, extends, and provides an intuitive, geometric justification for previous results on asymptotic LOCC. We use our condition to answer a variety of long-standing, unsolved problems, including for distinguishability of certain sets of states by LOCC. These include various classes of unextendible product bases, for which we prove they cannot be distinguished by LOCC even when infinite resources are available and an asymptotically vanishing error is allowed.
We point out a necessary condition that a quantum measurement can be implemented by the class of protocols known as Local Operations and Classical Communication, or LOCC, including in the limit of an infinite number of rounds. A generalization of this condition is then proven to hold for any measurement that is in the closure of that set, LOCCˉ{\bar{\textrm{LOCC}}}LOCCˉ. This generalization unifies, extends, and provides a geometric justification for previously known results on LOCCˉ{\bar{\text{LOCC}}}LOCCˉ, reproducing their consequences with regard to practical applications. We have also used our condition to answer a variety of long-standing, unsolved problems, including for distinguishability of certain sets of states by LOCC. These include various classes of unextendible product bases, for which we prove they cannot be distinguished by LOCC even when infinite resources are available and vanishing error is allowed.
We consider bipartite LOCC, the class of operations implementable by local quantum operations and classical communication between two parties. Surprisingly, there are operations that can be approximated to arbitrary precision but are impossible to implement exactly if only a finite number of messages are exchanged. This significantly complicates the analysis of what can or cannot be approximated with LOCC. Toward alleviating this problem, we exhibit two scenarios in which allowing vanishing error does not help. The first scenario is implementation of projective measurements with product measurement operators. The second scenario is the discrimination of unextendable product bases on two three-dimensional systems.
We prove a necessary condition that a quantum channel on a multipartite system may be approximated arbitrarily closely using local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We then extend those arguments to obtain a condition that applies to all quantum instruments, which range from the most refined case, a generalized measurement, to the most coarse-grained, which is a quantum channel. We illustrate these results by a detailed analysis of a quantum instrument that is known not to be implementable by LOCC, but which can be arbitrarily closely approximated within that framework. As one outgrowth of this analysis, we find a quantum measurement that falls into the same category: it cannot be implemented exactly by LOCC, but can be approximated by LOCC arbitrarily closely. This measurement has an infinite number of outcomes, leaving open the question as to whether or not there exists a measurement within this same category but having only a finite number of outcomes.
Quantum state discrimination involves identifying a given state out of a set of possible states. When the states are mutually orthogonal, perfect state discrimination is always possible using a global measurement. In the case of multipartite systems when the parties are constrained to use multiple rounds of local operations and classical communication (LOCC), perfect state discrimination is often impossible even with the use of asymptotic LOCC, wherein an error is allowed but must vanish in the limit of an infinite number of rounds. Utilizing our recent results on asymptotic LOCC, we derive a lower bound on the error probability for LOCC discrimination of any given set of mutually orthogonal pure states. Informed by the insights gained from this lower bound, we are able to prove necessary conditions for perfect state discrimination by asymptotic LOCC. We then illustrate by example the power of these necessary conditions in significantly simplifying the determination of whether perfect discrimination of a given set of states can be accomplished arbitrarily closely using LOCC. The latter examples include a proof that perfect discrimination by asymptotic LOCC is impossible for any minimal unextendible product basis (UPB), where minimal means that for the given multipartite system no UPB with a smaller number of states can exist. We also give a simple proof that what has been called strong nonlocality without entanglement is considerably stronger than had previously been demonstrated.
Every measurement that can be implemented by local quantum operations and classical communication (LOCC) using an infinite number of rounds is the limit of a sequence of measurements, where each measurement in the sequence requires only a finite number of rounds. This rather obvious and well-known fact is nonetheless of interest as it shows that these infinite-round measurements can be approximated arbitrarily closely simply by using more and more rounds of communication. Here we demonstrate the perhaps less obvious result that (at least) for bipartite systems, the reverse relationship also holds. Specifically, we show that every finite-round bipartite LOCC measurement is the limit of a continuous sequence of LOCC measurements, where each measurement in that sequence can be implemented by LOCC, but only with the use of an infinite number of rounds. Thus, the set of LOCC measurements that require an infinite number of rounds is dense in the entirety of LOCC, as is the set of finite-round LOCC measurements. This means there exist measurements that can only be implemented by LOCC by using an infinite number of rounds, but can nonetheless be approximated closely by using one round of communication, and actually in some cases, no communication is needed at all. These results follow from a necessary condition presented here for finite-round LOCC, which is extremely simple to check, is very easy to prove, and which can be violated by utilizing an infinite number of rounds.
We give a necessary condition that a separable measurement can be implemented by local quantum operations and classical communication (LOCC) in any finite number of rounds of communication, generalizing and strengthening a result obtained previously. That earlier result involved a bound that is tight when the number of measurement operators defining the measurement is relatively small. The present results generalize that bound to one that is tight for any finite number of measurement operators, and we also provide an extension which holds when that number is infinite. We apply these results to the famous example on a $3\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}3$ system known as ``domino states,'' which were the first demonstration of nonlocality without entanglement. Our extended necessary condition provides another way of showing that these states cannot be perfectly distinguished by (finite-round) LOCC. It directly shows that this conclusion also holds for their related rotated domino states. We also introduce a class of problems involving the unambiguous discrimination of quantum states, each of which is an example where the states can be optimally discriminated by a separable measurement, but according to our condition, cannot be optimally discriminated by LOCC. These examples nicely illustrate the usefulness of the present results, since our earlier necessary condition, which the present result generalizes, is not strong enough to reach a conclusion in any of these cases.