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arXiv:2103.08208 · Physical Review A

Optimal quantum discrimination of single-qubit unitary gates between two candidates

Akihito Soeda, Atsushi Shimbo, Mio Murao

Published Aug 20, 2021• 6 citations
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Abstract

We analyze a discrimination problem of a single-qubit unitary gate with two candidates, where the candidates are not provided with their classical description, but their quantum sample is. More precisely, there are three unitary quantum gates---one target and one sample for each of the two candidates---whose classical description is unknown except for their dimension. The target gate is chosen equally among the candidates. We obtain the optimal protocol that maximizes the expected success probability, assuming the Haar distribution for the candidates. This problem is originally introduced in Ref. [5] which provides a protocol achieving 7/8 in the expected success probability based on the ``unitary comparison'' protocol of Ref. [6]. The optimality of the protocol has been an open question since then. We prove the optimality of the comparison protocol, implying that only one of the two samples (one for each candidate) is needed to achieve an optimal discrimination. The optimization includes protocols outside the scope of quantum testers due to the dynamic ordering of the sample and target gates within a given protocol.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.104.022422

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We analyze a discrimination problem of a single-qubit unitary gate with two candidates, where the candidates are not provided with their classical description, but their quantum sample is. More precisely, there are three unitary quantum gates---one target and one sample for each of the two candidates---whose classical description is unknown except for their dimension. The target gate is chosen equally among the candidates. We obtain the optimal protocol that maximizes the expected success probability, assuming the Haar distribution for the candidates. This problem is originally introduced in Ref. [5] which provides a protocol achieving 7/8 in the expected success probability based on the ``unitary comparison'' protocol of Ref. [6]. The optimality of the protocol has been an open question since then. We prove the optimality of the comparison protocol, implying that only one of the two samples (one for each candidate) is needed to achieve an optimal discrimination. The optimization includes protocols outside the scope of quantum testers due to the dynamic ordering of the sample and target gates within a given protocol.
We analyze a discrimination problem of a single-qubit unitary gate with two candidates, where the candidates are not provided with their classical description, but their quantum sample is. The target gate is chosen equally among the candidates. We obtain the optimal protocol that maximizes the expected success probability, assuming the Haar distribution for the candidates. This problem is originally introduced in Hillery et al. (J. Mod. Opt. 2010) which provides a protocol achieving 7/8 in the expected success probability based on the ``unitary protocol of Andersson et al. (J. Phys. A 2003). The optimality of the protocol has been an open question since then. We prove the optimality of the comparison protocol, implying that only one of the two samples (one for each candidate) is needed to achieve an optimal discrimination. The optimization includes protocols outside the scope of quantum testers due to the dynamic ordering of the sample and target gates within a given protocol.
We study equivalence determination of unitary operations, a task analogous to quantum state discrimination. The candidate states are replaced by unitary operations given as a quantum sample, i.e., a black-box device implementing a candidate unitary operation, and the discrimination target becomes another black-box. The task is an instance of higher-order quantum computation with the black-boxes as input. The optimal error probability is calculated by semidefinite programs. Arbitrary quantum operations applied between the black-boxes in a general protocol provide advantages over protocols restricted to parallelized use of the black-boxes. We provide a numerical proof of such an advantage. In contrast, a parallelized scheme is analytically shown to exhibit the optimal performance of general schemes for a particular number of quantum samples of the candidates. We find examples of finite-sample equivalence determination that achieve the same performance as when a classical description of the candidates are provided, although an exact classical description cannot be obtained from finite quantum samples.
Quantum state discrimination is one of the most fundamental tasks in quantum information since it describes the read-out process of classical information from quantum states in quantum communications.In quantum state discrimination, a given test state is guaranteed to be identical to one of a set of candidate quantum states.The task is to determine the identity of the test state by performing an appropriate quantum measurement based on the classical descriptions of the candidate states.Quantum state discrimination also has several connections to the principles of quantum mechanics such as the no-cloning theorem and the no-signaling principle.One of fundamental properties of quantum mechanics is that the exact classical description of unknown quantum states cannot be retrieved from a single copy of the physical state.Quantum state discrimination in the case that the candidate states are given as two unknown physical states (reference states) but their classical descriptions are not given, has been investigated.The two reference states are labeled one and two, respectively.The task is to determine which of the two reference states is equivalent to the test state, whereas the descriptions of the states are not of interest.We call such a task as equivalence determination of quantum states.Discrimination of quantum operations has been also investigated and it has been shown that there is an intrinsic difference between discrimination of quantum state and discrimination of quantum operations.We analyze a unitary operation version of the equivalence determination task by using the concept of higher-order quantum computation to investigate properties of discrimination of other quantum objects.We consider three black-boxes (test box and reference boxes) implementing unknown unitary operations given as physical systems.The test box is guaranteed to implement one of the two unitary operations given by the reference boxes.Equivalence determination of unitary operations is a task to determine the reference box implementing the same unitary operation as the one by the test box.We assume that the unitary operations of the reference boxes are randomly sampled from the Haar measure of SU(2).We first consider the case that each of three black-boxes can be used only once both in parallel and ordered uses of the black-boxes.We show that the optimal success probability for equivalence determination is 7/8 by obtaining analytical solutions of the corresponding semidefinite programmings (SDPs) both in the parallel and ordered strategies.The optimal success probability can be achieved even without using one of the reference boxes.We also showed that entanglement of an initial state across the systems on which the reference boxes act and the test box acts is necessary to achieve the optimal success probability.We then consider the case that the multiple uses of the reference boxes are allowed.We consider the parallel strategies up to four uses of each of the reference boxes and obtain the optimal success probabilities by numerically solving the semidefinite programmings.We numerically show that the ordered strategies give improvement over the parallel strategies and the optimal success probability varies depending on the order of the black-boxes when one reference box is used once and the other reference box is used twice.This result indicates that an appropriate order of the black-boxes under the ordered strategies is necessary to obtain improvement over the parallel strategies. Chapter 1 Introduction Notations• H i , K j : Hilbert spaces labeled with i and j.• L(H): The set of linear operators on H.• L(H, K): The set of linear operators from H to K.• S(H) : The set of positive semidefinite linear operation of unit trace on H • Tr H : The partial trace over H • U † : The conjugate transpose of U • {Π i }: The positive operator-valued measure • { Π i }: The quantum tester • δ ij : The Kronecker delta, equal to 1 if i = j and 0 otherwise • dµ(•) : The Haar measure, the uniform distribution of the space of unitary operations • |I⟩⟩ : Unnormalized maximally entangled vector defined as |I⟩⟩ = i |i⟩|i⟩ • M : A quantum channel • M : Choi operator of a quantum channel M• U j : The irreducible subspace of the total angular momentum j.
Among the intriguing features of quantum theory, the problem of distinguishing quantum channels is of fundamental interest. In this paper, we focus on the single-shot discrimination of two noisy quantum channels using two distinct classes of probes: single-system (product) probes and entangled probes. Our aim is to identify optimal probing state for specific discrimination tasks and to analyze the necessity and role of entanglement in enhancing channel distinguishability. We show that maximally entangled probes are optimal for discriminating two qubit depolarizing channels, with any nonzero entanglement providing an advantage over single-system probes. In contrast, for dephasing channels in arbitrary dimensions, we prove that single-system probe can be optimal and that entanglement offers no improvement, even when the dephasing unitary is generalized. For qubit amplitude-damping channels, we identify distinct noise-dependent regimes in which either single-system probe outperforms maximally entangled probes and vice-versa. Moreover, we demonstrate that non-maximally entangled probes can act as the optimum probe if the noise parameters restricted to certain values in this task. We also present examples of noisy unitary channels for which discrimination is possible using non-maximally entangled probe, while both single-systems and maximally entangled probes fail. We introduce another class of noisy unitary channels for which perfect discrimination is achievable with a single system, while maximally entangled probes are insufficient. Finally, we show that two erasure channels can be optimally discriminated using any pure single-system probe, with no advantage gained from entanglement.
We investigate the performance of discrimination strategy in the comparison task of known quantum states. In the discrimination strategy, one infers whether or not two quantum systems are in the same state on the basis of the outcomes of separate discrimination measurements on each system. In some cases with more than two possible states, the optimal strategy in minimum-error comparison is that one should infer the two systems are in different states without any measurement, implying that the discrimination strategy performs worse than the trivial ``no-measurement'' strategy. We present a sufficient condition for this phenomenon to happen. For two pure states with equal prior probabilities, we determine the optimal comparison success probability with an error margin, which interpolates the minimum-error and unambiguous comparison. We find that the discrimination strategy is not optimal except for the minimum-error case.
We find optimality conditions for testers in discrimination of quantum channels. These conditions are obtained using semidefinite programming and are similar to optimality conditions for discrimination of quantum states. We get a simple condition for existence of an optimal tester with any given input state with maximal Schmidt rank, in particular with a maximally entangled input state. In the case when maximally entangled state is not optimal, an upper bound on the optimal success probability is obtained. The results for discrimination of two channels are applied to covariant channels, qubit channels, unitary channels, and simple projective measurements.