Capacities of quantum channels are fundamental quantities in the theory of quantum information. A desirable property is the additivity for a capacity measure. However, this cannot be achieved for a few quantities that have been established as capacity measures. Asymptotic regularization is generically necessary making the study of capacities notoriously hard. In this work, by a proper refinement of the physical settings of quantum communication using restricted encodings, we prove additive quantities for quantum channel capacities that can be employed for quantum Shannon theorems. This refinement is consistent with the principles of quantum theory, and it further demonstrates von Neumann entropy as the cornerstone of quantum information.
Capacities of quantum channels are fundamental quantities in the theory of quantum information. A desirable property is the additivity for a capacity measure. However, this cannot be achieved for a few quantities that have been established as capacity measures. Asymptotic regularization is generically necessary making the study of capacities notoriously hard. In this work, by a proper refinement of the physical settings of quantum communication using restricted encodings, we prove additive quantities for quantum channel capacities that can be employed for quantum Shannon theorems. This refinement is consistent with the principles of quantum theory, and it further demonstrates von Neumann entropy as the cornerstone of quantum information.
An elementary algebraic approach to unified quantum information theory is given. The operational meaning of entanglement as specifically quantum encoding is disclosed. General relative entropy as information divergence is introduced, and three most important types of relative information, namely, the Araki-Umegaki type (A-type), the Belavkin-Staszewski type (B-type), and the thermodynamical (C-type) are discussed. It is shown that true quantum entanglement-assisted entropy is greater than semiclassical (von Neumann) quantum entropy, and the proper positive quantum conditional entropy is introduced. The general quantum mutual information via entanglement is defined, and the corresponding types of quantum channel capacities as a supremum via the generalized encodings are formulated. The additivity problem for quantum logarithmic capacities for products of arbitrary quantum channels under appropriate constraints on encodings is discussed. It is proved that true quantum capacity, which is achieved on the standard entanglement as an optimal quantum encoding, retains the additivity property of the logarithmic quantum channel entanglement-assisted capacities on the products of quantum input states. This result for quantum logarithmic information of A-type, which was obtained earlier by the author, is extended to any type of quantum information.
The quantum capacity theorem is one of the most important theorems in quantum Shannon theory. It is a fundamentally “quantum” theorem in that it demonstrates that a fundamentally quantum information quantity, the coherent information, is an achievable rate for quantum communication over a quantum channel. The fact that the coherent information does not have a strong analog in classical Shannon theory truly separates the quantum and classical theories of information. The no-cloning theorem (Section 3.5.4) provides the intuition behind the quantum capacity theorem. The goal of any quantum communication protocol is for Alice to establish quantum correlations with the receiver Bob. We know well now that every quantum channel has an isometric extension, so that we can think of another receiver, the environment Eve, who is at a second output port of a larger unitary evolution. Were Eve able to learn anything about the quantum information that Alice is attempting to transmit to Bob, then Bob could not be retrieving this information—otherwise, they would violate the no-cloning theorem. Thus, Alice should figure out some subspace of the channel input where she can place her quantum information such that only Bob has access to it, while Eve does not. That the dimensionality of this subspace is exponential in the coherent information is perhaps then unsurprising in light of the above no-cloning reasoning. The coherent information is an entropy difference H(B) – H(E) —a measure of the amount of quantum correlations that Alice can establish with Bob less the amount that Eve can gain.
The quantum capacity theorem is one of the most important theorems in quantum Shannon theory. It is a fundamentally “quantum” theorem in that it demonstrates that a fundamentally quantum information quantity, the coherent information, is an achievable rate for quantum communication over a quantum channel. The fact that the coherent information does not have a strong analog in classical Shannon theory truly separates the quantum and classical theories of information. The no-cloning theorem (Section 3.5.4) provides the intuition behind the quantum capacity theorem. The goal of any quantum communication protocol is for Alice to establish quantum correlations with the receiver Bob. We know well now that every quantum channel has an isometric extension, so that we can think of another receiver, the environment Eve, who is at a second output port of a larger unitary evolution. Were Eve able to learn anything about the quantum information that Alice is attempting to transmit to Bob, then Bob could not be retrieving this information—otherwise, they would violate the no-cloning theorem. Thus, Alice should figure out some subspace of the channel input where she can place her quantum information such that only Bob has access to it, while Eve does not. That the dimensionality of this subspace is exponential in the coherent information is perhaps then unsurprising in light of the above no-cloning reasoning. The coherent information is an entropy difference H ( B ) -H ( E )—a measure of the amount of quantum correlations that Alice can establish with Bob less the amount that Eve can gain. We proved achievability of the coherent information for quantum data transmission in Corollary 22.2.1, but the roundabout path that we followed to prove achievability there perhaps does not give much insight into the structure of a quantum code that achieves the coherent information. Our approach in this chapter is different and should shed more light on this structure. Specifically, we show how to make coherent versions of the private classical codes from the previous chapter.
We propose a framework to variationally obtain detectable capacity bounds for quantum channels. The proposal of this framework is motivated by the difficulty of estimating the von Neumann entropy of an unknown quantum state. Instead of estimating the von Neumann entropy at the channel output, we propose to estimate the state purity---which can be measured by a single measurement setting---followed by bounding the von Neumann entropy from above and below. This procedure leads to new upper and lower bounds on various communication rates of quantum channels for some fixed input states. Then, by utilizing the variational method to find optimal input states we obtain lower bounds on (i) the quantum capacity of arbitrary channels, (ii) the entanglement-assisted classical capacity of arbitrary channels, and (iii) the classical capacity of covariant channels. Corresponding to these lower bounds, we also obtain upper bounds on (i) N-shot coherent information, (ii) the entanglement-assisted classical capacity, and (iii) the N-shot Holevo capacity of arbitrary quantum channels. All these bounds can be estimated by a single measurement setting without needing a full process tomography or any further a priori knowledge, e.g., preferred basis of the channel.
The von Neumann entropy of a quantum state is a central concept in physics and information theory, having a number of compelling physical interpretations. There is a certain perspective that the most fundamental notion in quantum mechanics is that of a quantum channel, as quantum states, unitary evolutions, measurements, and discarding of quantum systems can each be regarded as certain kinds of quantum channels. Thus, an important goal is to define a consistent and meaningful notion of the entropy of a quantum channel. Motivated by the fact that the entropy of a state ρ can be formulated as the difference of the number of physical qubits and the "relative entropy distance"between ρ and the maximally mixed state, here we define the entropy of a channel N as the difference of the number of physical qubits of the channel output with the "relative entropy distance"between N and the completely depolarizing channel. We prove that this definition satisfies all of the axioms, recently put forward by Gour [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 65, 5880 (2019)IETTAW0018-944810.1109/TIT.2019.2907989], required for a channel entropy function. The task of quantum channel merging, in which the goal is for the receiver to merge his share of the channel with the environment's share, gives a compelling operational interpretation of the entropy of a channel. The entropy of a channel can be negative for certain channels, but this negativity has an operational interpretation in terms of the channel merging protocol. We define Rényi and min-entropies of a channel and prove that they satisfy the axioms required for a channel entropy function. Among other results, we also prove that a smoothed version of the min-entropy of a channel satisfies the asymptotic equipartition property.