The communication cost of a classical protocol is typically measured in terms of the number of bits communicated for this determines the time required for communication during the protocol. Similarly, for quantum communication protocols, which use finite-dimensional quantum states, the communication cost is measured in terms of the number of qubits communicated. However, in quantum physics, one can also use infinite-dimensional states, like optical quantum states, for communication protocols. Communication cost measures based on counting the (equivalent) number of qubits transmitted during communication cannot be directly used to measure the cost of such protocols, which use infinite-dimensional states. Moreover, one cannot infer any physical property of infinite-dimensional protocols using such qubit-based communication costs. In this paper, we provide a framework to understand the growth of physical resources in infinite-dimensional protocols. We focus on optical protocols for the sake of concreteness. The time required for communication and the energy expended during communication are identified as the important physical resources of such protocols. In an optical protocol, the time required for communication is determined by the number of time-bin modes that are transmitted from one party to another. The mean photon number of the messages sent determines the energy required during communication in the protocol. We prove a lower bound on the tradeoff between the growth of these two quantities with the growth of the problem size. We call such tradeoff relations optical quantum communication complexity relations.
The communication cost of a classical protocol is typically measured in terms of the number of bits communicated for this determines the time required for communication during the protocol. Similarly, for quantum communication protocols, which use finite-dimensional quantum states, the communication cost is measured in terms of the number of qubits communicated. However, in quantum physics, one can also use infinite-dimensional states, like optical quantum states, for communication protocols. Communication cost measures based on counting the (equivalent) number of qubits transmitted during communication cannot be directly used to measure the cost of such protocols, which use infinite-dimensional states. Moreover, one cannot infer any physical property of infinite-dimensional protocols using such qubit-based communication costs. In this paper, we provide a framework to understand the growth of physical resources in infinite-dimensional protocols. We focus on optical protocols for the sake of concreteness. The time required for communication and the energy expended during communication are identified as the important physical resources of such protocols. In an optical protocol, the time required for communication is determined by the number of time-bin modes that are transmitted from one party to another. The mean photon number of the messages sent determines the energy required during communication in the protocol. We prove a lower bound on the tradeoff between the growth of these two quantities with the growth of the problem size. We call such tradeoff relations optical quantum communication complexity relations.
Information cost is often treated as a secondary quantity in communication complexity, even when the operational resource of interest is the information revealed by a protocol rather than its message length. This mismatch becomes particularly important in quantum communication and cryptography, where classical leakage must be compared directly with the information carried by quantum states. For this reason, we derive direct finite-size lower bounds, with explicit constants, on the information cost of one-way private-coin protocols for Hidden Matching, a communication-complexity problem, and two related tasks: Sampling Matching and Beta-Partial Matching. These bounds lead to two concrete applications. First, they provide a universal classical benchmark for coherent-state implementations of Sampling Matching, opening a route to an unconditional quantum advantage in information cost for a one-way communication complexity problem on a photonic platform. Second, they substantially tighten the analysis of HM-QCT, a recent everlastingly secure hybrid post-quantum/QKD protocol, bringing its implementation closer to realistic optical parameters while preserving the possibility of exceeding the fundamental rate-loss limits of standard QKD.
We study the complexity of quantum decomposable randomized encodings (QDRE). We establish a bi-directional connection between the QDRE model and the communication complexity model of quantum private simultaneous message protocols (QPSM), where classical communication is free, and quantum communication is the primary complexity measure. We show the following upper and lower bounds. (1) For every quantum channel mapping n to m qubits, we give a QPSM protocol with quantum communication m, using exponential pre-shared entanglement. In particular, constant-output channels have O(1) quantum communication, and classical-output channels require no quantum communication. (2) With O(n) pre-shared entanglement, every one-qubit-output channel has an O(n)-quantum-communication QPSM protocol. Conversely, there exists a channel and a constant c>0 for which any protocol with at most cn pre-shared entanglement requires Ω(n) quantum communication. (3) In contrast, we identify a structured class of quantum channels, Clifford-induced channels, for which there exist QPSM protocols with O(n) pre-shared entangled qubits and only O(1) quantum communication complexity. Through our connection, we obtain analogous upper and lower bounds on the quantum encoding size of QDRE. Our results show that the amount of pre-shared entanglement plays a central role in quantum encoding size and quantum communication complexity.
Sending quantum information reliably over long distances is a central challenge in quantum technology in general, and in quantum optics in particular, since most quantum communication relies on optical fibres or free-space links. Here, we address this problem by shifting the focus from the quantity of information sent to the quality of the transmission, i.e. the rate of decay of the transmission error with respect to the number of channel uses. For the general class of teleportation-simulable channels, which includes all channels arising in quantum optical communication, we prove that the single-letter reverse relative entropy of entanglement of the Choi state upper bounds the error exponent of two-way assisted quantum communication - paralleling the celebrated capacity bound of [Pirandola et al., Nat. Comm. (2017)] in terms of the regularised relative entropy of entanglement. Remarkably, for Gaussian channels our bound can be computed efficiently through a convex program with simple constraints involving only finite-dimensional covariance matrices. As a prototypical application, we derive closed-form analytical expressions of our upper bound as well as random-coding-based lower bounds for several one-mode Gaussian channels. Extending recent work [Lami et al., arXiv:2408.07067 (2024)] to infinite-dimensional systems, we further endow the reverse relative entropy of entanglement with an exact operational interpretation in entanglement testing, and show that it characterises the rate of entanglement distillation under non-entangling operations. These findings offer a new perspective on entanglement as a resource and sharpen the theoretical benchmarks for future quantum optical networks.
A long-standing open question is to characterize the classical communication cost of simulating the correlations arising from measurements on finite-dimensional quantum systems. We consider this question in the prepare-and-measure scenario. First we construct a classical simulation model involving a finite average number of bits of one-way communication that simulates exactly the correlations arising from arbitrary d-dimensional quantum states and arbitrary measurements. Second, we show that no classical simulation protocol involving a finite average message dimension can exist for d≥4, hence strengthening a recent result of de Gois, Santos and Vieira. Our first result relies on a more general simulation theorem which can be applied to certain continuous variable (i.e. infinite-dimensional) quantum systems, and even beyond quantum theory, e.g. to generalized probabilistic theories. In particular, we show that multimode Gaussian states of bounded average energy and general Gaussian measurements admit an exact classical simulation with a finite expected number of bits. Overall, our results show that the classical simulation cost of quantum communication is essentially as high as it could be.
The work in this thesis can be divided into three parts. The first two parts deal with optical quantum communication protocols and the third part deals with quantum cryptography. The first part of the thesis is a step towards reformulating quantum protocols in terms of coherent states. Quantum communication protocols are typically formulated in terms of abstract qudit states and operations. This leaves the question of an experimental realization open. Direct translation of these protocols, say into single photons with some d-dimensional degree of freedom, are typically challenging to realize. Multi-mode coherent states, on the other hand, can be easily generated experimentally. Reformulation of protocols in terms of these states has been a successful strategy for implementation of quantum protocols. Quantum key distribution and the quantum fingerprinting protocol have both followed this route. In Chapter 3, we characterize the Gram matrices of multi-mode coherent states in an attempt to understand the class of communication protocols, which can be implemented using these states. We also derive the closure of the Gram matrices, which can be implemented in this way, so that we also characterize those matrices, which can be approximated arbitrarily well using multi-mode coherent states. \n \nIn the second part of the thesis, Chapter 4, we describe our collaboration with an experimental group to implement the quantum fingerprinting protocol and examine the tradeoffs between the resources required to implement such protocols. It is seen that it is difficult to implement the quantum fingerprinting protocol experimentally for large input sizes. This leads us to study the tradeoff between the two resources expended during optically implemented simultaneous message passing communication protocols: the duration of the protocol and the energy required to run it. We derive general bounds on the growth of these quantities which are valid for all optical protocols. We also develop tighter bounds for the growth of these resources for protocols implementing quantum fingerprinting with coherent states. \n \nFinally in Chapter 5, we venture into quantum cryptography. We introduce a new setting for two-party cryptography with temporarily trusted third parties. In this setting, in addition to Alice and Bob, there are third parties, which Alice and Bob both trust to be honest during the course of the protocol. However, once the protocol concludes, there is no guarantee over the behaviour of these third parties. It is possible that they collaborate and act adversarially against the honest parties. We implement a variant of bit commitment in this setting, which we call erasable bit commitment. In this primitive, Alice has the choice of either opening or erasing her commitment after the commit phase. The ability to ask for an erasure allows Alice to ask the trusted nodes to erase her commitment in case the trust period is about to expire. However, this ability also makes erasable bit commitment weaker than the standard version of bit commitment. In addition to satisfying the security requirements of bit commitment, our protocol also does not reveal any information about the commitment to the third parties. Lastly, our protocol for this primitive requires a constant number of trusted third parties and can tolerate a small number of dishonest trusted nodes as well as implementation errors.
We investigate how quantum coherence scales and is redistributed in quantum communication protocols, using superdense coding and quantum teleportation as paradigmatic case studies. Employing the relative entropy of coherence as a circuit-level resource measure, we show that multipartite resource states relevant to generalized superdense coding can enable scalable communication while exhibiting only logarithmic or even constant coherence growth, depending on their entanglement structure. In sharp contrast, quantum teleportation displays an unavoidable, protocol-induced coherence cost that grows linearly with the number of teleported qubits and is independent of the input state. Through a stage-resolved analysis of the teleportation circuit, we separate protocol-generated coherence from message-dependent contributions and identify a universal two-bit coherence offset per teleported qubit at the maximal-coherence stage. We further demonstrate explicitly that this extensive intermediate coherence generation is fully consistent with information-theoretic bounds, including the Holevo limit, and does not correspond to an increase in accessible classical information.