Quantum mechanics allows operations to be in indefinite causal order, leading to advantages in computational and communication tasks. However, basic notions such as communication capacity have not yet been formalized. In light of this, through the process matrix formalism, we formulate different classical capacities for a bipartite quantum process. For one-way communication, we find that general quantum processes satisfy a generalization of the Holevo bound, i.e., we can send, at most, one bit per qubit. The result also holds for processes with indefinite causal order and with shared entanglement between the sender and the receiver. We further extend known bounds to classical channel capacities, showing that general processes cannot outperform causally separable ones. Next, we study bidirectional communication through a causally separable process. Our result shows that a bidirectional protocol cannot exceed the limit of a one-way communication protocol. Finally, we generalize this result to a multiparty broadcast communication protocol through a definite ordered process.
Quantum mechanics allows operations to be in indefinite causal order, leading to advantages in computational and communication tasks. However, basic notions such as communication capacity have not yet been formalized. In light of this, through the process matrix formalism, we formulate different classical capacities for a bipartite quantum process. For one-way communication, we find that general quantum processes satisfy a generalization of the Holevo bound, i.e., we can send, at most, one bit per qubit. The result also holds for processes with indefinite causal order and with shared entanglement between the sender and the receiver. We further extend known bounds to classical channel capacities, showing that general processes cannot outperform causally separable ones. Next, we study bidirectional communication through a causally separable process. Our result shows that a bidirectional protocol cannot exceed the limit of a one-way communication protocol. Finally, we generalize this result to a multiparty broadcast communication protocol through a definite ordered process.
Quantum theory is in principle compatible with scenarios where physical processes occur in an indefinite order, potentially yielding advantages in a broad range of information processing tasks. However, advantages in communication, the most basic form of information processing, have so far remained controversial and hard to prove. Here we provide a framework for assessing the role of causal order in communication, by comparing different causal structures under the constraint that the allowed operations must not generate signaling from signaling-incapable devices. Using this framework, we establish a clear-cut advantage of indefinite causal order, and, at the same time, we identify a series of fundamental limits to the communication power of causal structures in quantum mechanics. Notably, we find that a special form of indefinite causal order, obtained by coherently controlling the order of two processes, enhances the transmission of classical messages in a one-shot scenario, but no quantum operation with indefinite order can offer advantages over shared entanglement when asymptotically many uses of the same communication device are employed. Overall, our results unveil non-trivial relations between communication, causal order, entanglement, and no-signaling quantum processes.
Can quantum computation become more powerful when operations do not need to follow a definite causal order? We study this question in the process matrix formalism of Oreshkov et al. (Nature Communications, 2012), which allows quantum operations to be connected without a fixed global order. In the computational model, a quantum circuit succinctly describes a process matrix, and the algorithm is given access to its generated channel, with computational cost measured by the size of the generating circuit.
We give polynomial-time algorithms in two settings. First, general process matrix computation suffices to solve every problem in NP. The valid processes used by our algorithm satisfy the purification postulate of Araújo et al. (Quantum, 2017), and their generated channels are unitary, although their generating circuits are not. Second, requiring the process matrices themselves to be pure, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for unique-sink orientation, a general problem capturing several longstanding computational problems in optimization. Our unitary generators are constructed explicitly and efficiently. Assuming that unique-sink orientation has no quantum polynomial-time algorithm, our result shows that indefinite causal order can provide computational power beyond BQP within the process matrix formalism, even while preserving unitarity.
In recent years, the investigation of causal relations in quantum theory has attracted a lot of interest. In particular, it has been found that it is possible to conceive of scenarios where some parties perform operations that are compatible with quantum theory locally, but that cannot be embedded into a global background causal structure. Such indefinite causal structures are of interest from a fundamental point of view, but also from the perspective of quantum information processing, since they do not fit into the usual paradigm of quantum circuits, which assumes a definite causal order. The main aim of this thesis is to study indefinite quantum causal relations involving more than two parties. Compared to the bipartite case, there are many new aspects and complications that arise in multipartite situations, which need to be clarified in order to fundamentally understand quantum causal structures, and to shed light on their implications and potential usefulness for quantum information processing.A suitable mathematical framework for the investigation of quantum causal relations is the process matrix formalism. In this framework, the notion of causal nonseparability was introduced in order to qualify scenarios that are incompatible with a definite causal order. In Chapter 2, we study how to generalise this concept to the multipartite case, how to characterise multipartite causally (non)separable quantum processes, and how to certify multipartite causal nonseparability. Another important topic is to determine which quantum scenarios with indefinite causal order are physically implementable, and how they can be realised concretely. In Chapter 3, we introduce two new classes of physically realisable multipartite quantum processes, and characterise them in terms of their process matrix descriptions. In particular, we define the class of quantum circuits with quantum control of causal order. The simplest example of such a circuit is the quantum switch, a protocol in which the order between two operations is controlled by a qubit in a superposition state, and which defines a causally nonseparable process. The class we introduce also contains more general examples of causally nonseparable processes with new features. We then show how the process matrix characterisation of this class allows us to search for new quantum information processing applications of causal nonseparability. In Chapter 4, we investigate a particular quantum communication effect in a scenario involving coherent control between two quantum channels. This leads us to a more general analysis of the notion of a coherently controlled channel, which involves certain subtilities. In Chapter 5, we turn to another problem that arises in multipartite scenarios, namely whether a given phenomenon is genuinely multipartite or not. More particularly, we study genuinely multipartite (non)causal correlations. In Chapter 6, we show that anomalous weak values are possible without post-selection. In Chapter 7, we show that certain tripartite process matrices, namely those that are unitarily extensible, have a realisation on so-called time-delocalised subsystems, i.e., quantum subsystems that are not associated with a definite time. The class of unitarily extensible tripartite process matrices is larger than the class of quantum circuits with quantum control, and in particular contains processes that violate so-called causal inequalities.
The capacity of distant parties to send signals to one another is a fundamental requirement in many information-processing tasks. Such ability is determined by the causal structure connecting the parties, and more generally, by the intermediate processes carrying signals from one laboratory to another. Here we build a fully fledged resource theory of causal connection for all multi-party communication scenarios, encompassing those where the parties operate in a definite causal order and also where the order is indefinite. We define and characterize the set of free processes and three different sets of free transformations thereof, resulting in three distinct resource theories of causal connection. In the causally ordered setting, we identify the most resourceful processes in the bipartite and tripartite scenarios. In the general setting, instead, our results suggest that there is no global most valuable resource. We establish the signalling robustness as a resource monotone of causal connection and provide tight bounds on it for many pertinent sets of processes. Finally, we introduce a resource theory of causal non-separability, and show that it is – in contrast to the case of causal connection – unique. Together our results offer a flexible and comprehensive framework to quantify and transform general quantum processes, as well as insights into their multi-layered causal connection structures.
The unique and often-weird properties of quantum mechanics allow an information carrier to propagate through multiple trajectories of quantum channels simultaneously. This ultimately leads us to quantum trajectories with an indefinite causal order of quantum channels. It has been shown that indefinite causal order enables the violation ofbottleneck capacity, which bounds the amount of the transferable classical and quantum information through a classical trajectory with a well-defined causal order of quantum channels. In this treatise, we investigate this beneficial property in the realm of both entanglement-assisted classical and quantum communications. To this aim, we derive closed-form capacity expressions of entanglement-assisted classical and quantum communication for arbitrary quantum Pauli channels over classical and quantum trajectories. We show that by exploiting the indefinite causal order of quantum channels, we obtain capacity gains over classical trajectory as well as the violation of bottleneck capacity for various practical scenarios. Furthermore, we determine the operating region where entanglement-assisted communication over quantum trajectory obtains capacity gain against classical trajectory and where the entanglement-assisted communication over quantum trajectory violates the bottleneck capacity.
We propose a bipartite quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol based on causal nonseparability: the presence of a resource -- a process matrix -- that does not correspond to any definite causal order between two parties. In our protocol, Alice and Bob perform local operations arranged in a ``causal-order guessing game,'' whereby each round yields an 85.35\% probability of matching bits when the communication is undisturbed. This raw matching probability (or equivalently, a ∼14.65% error rate) is amenable to standard forward error-correction strategies. We further discuss the practical construction of the QKD protocol using indefinite causal order, where several different scenarios are deeply analyzed.