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arXiv:2009.04783 · Physical Review A

Bounds on amplitude-damping-channel discrimination

Jason L. Pereira, Stefano Pirandola

Published Feb 18, 2021• 20 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Amplitude-damping (AD) channels are good models for many physical scenarios, and so the development of protocols to discriminate between them is an important task in quantum information science. It is therefore important to bound the performance of such protocols. Since adaptivity has been shown to improve the performance of discrimination protocols, bounds on the distinguishability of AD channels must take this into account. In this paper, we use both channel simulation and a bound based on the diamond norm to significantly tighten the upper bound on the trace norm between the possible outputs of binary channel discrimination protocols acting on AD channels (and hence the lower bound on the error probability of such protocols). The diamond norm between any two AD channels is found analytically, giving the optimal error probability for a one-shot discrimination protocol. We also present a tighter lower bound on the achievable trace norm between protocol outputs (and a corresponding upper bound on the achievable error probability). The upper and lower bounds are compared with existing bounds and then applied to quantum hacking and biological quantum sensing scenarios.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.103.022610

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Amplitude-damping (AD) channels are good models for many physical scenarios, and so the development of protocols to discriminate between them is an important task in quantum information science. It is therefore important to bound the performance of such protocols. Since adaptivity has been shown to improve the performance of discrimination protocols, bounds on the distinguishability of AD channels must take this into account. In this paper, we use both channel simulation and a bound based on the diamond norm to significantly tighten the upper bound on the trace norm between the possible outputs of binary channel discrimination protocols acting on AD channels (and hence the lower bound on the error probability of such protocols). The diamond norm between any two AD channels is found analytically, giving the optimal error probability for a one-shot discrimination protocol. We also present a tighter lower bound on the achievable trace norm between protocol outputs (and a corresponding upper bound on the achievable error probability). The upper and lower bounds are compared with existing bounds and then applied to quantum hacking and biological quantum sensing scenarios.
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We analyze minimum-error discrimination of two qubit dynamical processes generated by phase-covariant amplitude-damping Lindbladians in a single-use scenario. The optimization involves both the input probe, possibly entangled with an isolated ancilla, and the interrogation time. For unassisted probes we obtain a closed expression for the optimal trace-norm distinguishability at fixed time, with distinct interior and boundary branches. For entanglement-assisted probes, the common phase covariance of the two channels reduces the diamond-norm optimization to a one-parameter Schmidt family. The resulting formula gives transparent sufficient conditions for fixed-time entanglement advantage and separates this local advantage from advantage after global optimization over time. We exhibit examples in which the best unassisted strategy is approached only asymptotically, whereas an entangled probe achieves a strictly smaller error probability at finite time.
Quantum hypothesis testing is an important tool for quantum information processing.Two main strategies have been widely adopted: in a minimum error discrimination strategy, the average error probability is minimized; while in an unambiguous discrimination strategy, an inconclusive decision (abstention) is allowed to vanish any possibility of errors when a conclusive result is obtained.In both scenarios, the testing between quantum states is relatively well understood, for example, the ultimate limits of the performance are established decades ago; however, the testing between quantum channels is less understood.Although the ultimate limit of minimum error discrimination between channels has been explored recently, the corresponding limit of unambiguous discrimination is unknown.In this paper, we formulate an approximate unambiguous discrimination scenario, and derive the ultimate limits of the performance for both states and channels.In particular, in the channel case, our lower bound of the inconclusive probability holds for arbitrary adaptive sensing protocols.For the special class of "teleportation-covariant" channels, the lower bound is achievable with maximum entangled inputs and no adaptive strategy is necessary.
We investigate converse bounds on the average decoding error probability in finite-blocklength classical-quantum channel coding. We first present a lower bound for multiple quantum hypothesis testing in terms of pairwise trace distances and derive a corresponding fidelity bound. We then obtain a spectrum-based converse that depends only on the a priori probabilities and spectra of the states. We show that the converse bound remains tight for the quantum depolarizing channel under suitable conditions. For codes with product-state outputs, this converse takes an explicit form involving products of output-state eigenvalues. We apply it to binary codes over the quantum amplitude damping channel using the input states ∣+⟩\vert+\rangle∣+⟩ and ∣−⟩\vert-\rangle∣−⟩. For this setting, we also discuss a normal approximation to the spectrum-based converse in the large blocklength regime. In all numerical examples considered, the spectrum-based converse is tighter than the other converse bounds at low noise levels.
Abstract: We derive an improved upper bound on the two-way-assisted capacities of the qubit amplitude-damping channel with decay probability γ\gammaγ, given by log⁡2[1+(1−γ)γγ/(1−γ)]\log_2[1+(1-\gamma)\gamma^{\gamma/(1-\gamma)}]log2​[1+(1−γ)γγ/(1−γ)]. It applies to quantum communication, entanglement distribution, private communication, and secret-key agreement, and strictly improves the PLOB relative-entropy bound, the analytic max-relative-entropy bound, and the optimized balanced squashed-entanglement bound. At high damping, a known triple-rail protocol attains more than 99.54%99.54\%99.54% of its leading coefficient. Our method extends sector teleportation simulation to qubits: phase rotations and permutations give exact simulations within fixed-excitation subspaces while preserving the two-level input structure. We determine the exact, additive relative entropy of entanglement of the amplitude-damping resources and the exact regularized entanglement gain at fixed input population. We then derive explicit bounds for generalized amplitude damping, which includes thermal excitation. Combining the amplitude-damping gain with unital and entanglement-breaking channels gives a closed expression that recovers the zero-temperature result and vanishes throughout the entanglement-breaking region. It improves established benchmarks over broad parameter ranges, while the exact entanglement of the generalized resources remains open. Both results admit refinements under an average-excitation constraint. The bounds provide quantitative limits for adaptive communication through relaxing qubits and show how a sector simulation can remain useful beyond channels whose resource entanglement is known exactly.
The goal of quantum channel discrimination and estimation is to determine the identity of an unknown channel from a discrete or continuous set, respectively. The query complexity of these tasks is equal to the minimum number of times one must call an unknown channel to identify it within a desired threshold on the error probability. In this paper, we establish lower bounds on the query complexities of channel discrimination and estimation, in both the parallel and adaptive access models. We do so by establishing new or applying known upper bounds on the squared Bures distance and symmetric logarithmic derivative Fisher information of channels. Phrasing our statements and proofs in terms of isometric extensions of quantum channels allows us to give conceptually simple proofs for both novel and known bounds. We also provide alternative proofs for several established results in an effort to present a consistent and unified framework for quantum channel discrimination and estimation, which we believe will be helpful in addressing future questions in the field.