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arXiv:2101.05686 · Journal of Physics A Mathematical and Theoretical

Capacity of trace decreasing quantum operations and superadditivity of coherent information for a generalized erasure channel

Sergey N. Filippov

Published Apr 30, 2021• 20 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Losses in quantum communication lines severely affect the rates of reliable information transmission and are usually considered to be state-independent. However, the loss probability does depend on the system state in general, with the polarization dependent losses being a prominent example. Here we analyze biased trace decreasing quantum operations that assign different loss probabilities to states and introduce the concept of a generalized erasure channel. We find lower and upper bounds for the classical and quantum capacities of the generalized erasure channel as well as characterize its degradability and antidegradability. We reveal superadditivity of coherent information in the case of the polarization dependent losses, with the difference between the two-letter quantum capacity and the single-letter quantum capacity exceeding 7.197 × 10 −3 bits per qubit sent, the greatest value among qubit-input channels reported so far.

DOI
10.1088/1751-8121/abfd61

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Abstract Losses in quantum communication lines severely affect the rates of reliable information transmission and are usually considered to be state-independent. However, the loss probability does depend on the system state in general, with the polarization dependent losses being a prominent example. Here we analyze biased trace decreasing quantum operations that assign different loss probabilities to states and introduce the concept of a generalized erasure channel. We find lower and upper bounds for the classical and quantum capacities of the generalized erasure channel as well as characterize its degradability and antidegradability. We reveal superadditivity of coherent information in the case of the polarization dependent losses, with the difference between the two-letter quantum capacity and the single-letter quantum capacity exceeding 7.197 × 10 −3 bits per qubit sent, the greatest value among qubit-input channels reported so far.
Coherent information quantifies the achievable rate of the reliable quantum information transmission through a communication channel. Use of the correlated quantum states (multiletter codes) instead of the factorized ones (single-letter codes) may result in an increase in the achievable rate, a phenomenon known as the coherent-information superadditivity. However, even for simple physical models of channels it is rather difficult to detect the superadditivity and find the advantageous multiletter codes. Here we consider the case of polarization dependent losses and propose some physically motivated multiletter codes which outperform all single-letter ones in a wide range of the channel parameters. We show that in the asymptotic limit of the infinite code length the superadditivity phenomenon takes place whenever the communication channel is neither degradable nor antidegradable. Besides the superadditivity identification, we also provide a method how to modify the proposed codes and get a higher quantum communication rate by doubling the code length. The obtained results give a deeper understanding of useful multiletter codes and may serve as a benchmark for quantum capacity estimations and future approaches toward an optimal strategy to transfer quantum information.
Superadditivity of quantum capacity of communication channels is one of the most interesting findings of the field. Yard and Smith, finding a relation between the private capacity and the assisted quantum capacity, showed a striking example of superadditivity, i.e. two channels of zero quantum capacity could achieve a positive quantum capacity when used together [1]. The four dimensional channels they used are a 50% erasure channel (therefore zero quantum capacity, due to no-cloning theorem) and a Horodecki channel (again zero quantum capacity due to incapability of sharing free entanglement). In this work we present the more general cases of superadditivity. Directly calculating the lower bounds of joint quantum capacities without using the relation between private capacity and assisted quantum capacity, we examine scenarios considering erasure channels of arbitrary probabilities and different Horodecki channels, and discuss the roles of degradability and anti-degradability as well as the role of the private capacity in superadditivity. We also derive an upper bound for the joint quantum capacity for the superactivation case.
Coherent information quantifies the achievable rate of the reliable quantum information transmission through a communication channel. Use of the correlated quantum states instead of the factorized ones may result in an increase in the coherent information, a phenomenon known as superadditivity. However, even for simple physical models of channels it is rather difficult to detect the superadditivity and find the advantageous multipartite states. Here we consider the case of polarization-dependent losses and propose some physically motivated multipartite entangled states which outperform all factorized states in a wide range of the channel parameters. We show that, in the asymptotic limit of infinite number of channel uses, the superadditivity phenomenon takes place whenever the channel is neither degradable nor antidegradable. Besides the superadditivity identification, we also provide a method to modify the proposed states and get a higher quantum communication rate by doubling the number of channel uses. The obtained results give a deeper understanding of coherent information in the multishot scenario and may serve as a benchmark for quantum capacity estimations and future approaches toward an optimal strategy to transfer quantum information.
The quantum capacity of a noisy channel quantifies the maximum rate at which quantum information can be transmitted reliably. For general channels, its evaluation requires an optimization over arbitrarily many channel uses. Degradable channels form a central exception: their capacity is given by the single-letter coherent information, while antidegradable channels have zero capacity. Nevertheless, even for these fundamental classes, it has remained open whether communication above capacity becomes possible when a fixed non-maximal error is tolerated. Here we resolve this problem by proving an exponential strong converse for every finite-dimensional degradable and antidegradable channel: at any rate above capacity, the fidelity of every coding scheme decays exponentially with the number of channel uses. As an immediate consequence, we establish the first all-code exponential strong converse for the quantum erasure channel throughout its full parameter range, strengthening previous results that applied only to almost all codes. We also show that exponential strong-converse bounds are preserved under receiver post-processing. This yields efficiently computable semidefinite-programming bounds for arbitrary finite-dimensional channels, improved bounds for Pauli channels, and an exact exponential strong converse for a nondegradable multilevel amplitude-damping family.
Quantum channel capacity is a fundamental quantity in order to understand how well quantum information can be transmitted or corrected when subjected to noise. However, it is generally not known how to compute such quantities since the quantum channel coherent information is not additive for all channels, implying that it must be maximized over an unbounded number of channel uses. This leads to the phenomenon known as superadditivity, which refers to the fact that the regularized coherent information of nnn channel uses exceeds one-shot coherent information. In this article, we study how the gain in quantum capacity of qudit depolarizing channels relates to the dimension of the considered systems. We make use of an argument based on the no-cloning bound in order to prove that the possible superadditive effects decrease as a function of the dimension for such family of channels. In addition, we prove that the capacity of the qudit depolarizing channel coincides with the coherent information when $d\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$. We also discuss the private classical capacity and obtain similar results. We conclude that when high-dimensional qudits experiencing depolarizing noise are considered, the coherent information of the channel is not only an achievable rate, but essentially the maximum possible rate for any quantum block code.
The quantum capacity of a quantum channel captures its capability for noiseless quantum communication. It lies at the heart of quantum information theory. Unfortunately, our poor understanding of nonadditivity of coherent information makes it hard to understand the quantum capacity of all but very special channels. In this Letter, we consider the dephrasure channel, which is the concatenation of a dephasing channel and an erasure channel. This very simple channel displays remarkably rich and exotic properties: we find nonadditivity of coherent information at the two-letter level, a substantial gap between the threshold for zero quantum capacity and zero single-letter coherent information, a big gap between single-letter coherent and private information, and positive quantum capacity for all complementary channels. Its clean form simplifies the evaluation of coherent information substantially and, as such, we hope that the dephrasure channel will provide a much-needed laboratory for the testing of new ideas about nonadditivity.