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arXiv:2206.06106 · Physical Review A

Capacities of the covariant Pauli channel

Abbas Poshtvan, Vahid Karimipour

Published Dec 8, 2022• 7 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We study four well-known capacities of a two-parameter family of qubit Pauli channels. These are the channels that are covariant under the $\text{SO}(2)$ group and contain the depolarizing channel as a special case. We find exact expressions for the classical capacity and entanglement-assisted capacities, and analytically determine the regions where the quantum capacity of the channel vanishes. We then use a flag extension to find upper bound for the quantum capacity and private capacity of these channels in the entire region of parameter space and also obtain the lower bound for the quantum capacity by calculating the single-shot quantum capacity numerically. In conjunction with previous results on depolarizing channels, our result is one step forward for determining the capacities of the full Pauli channel.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.106.062408

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We study four well-known capacities of a two-parameter family of qubit Pauli channels. These are the channels that are covariant under the SO(2)\text{SO}(2)SO(2) group and contain the depolarizing channel as a special case. We find exact expressions for the classical capacity and entanglement-assisted capacities, and analytically determine the regions where the quantum capacity of the channel vanishes. We then use a flag extension to find upper bound for the quantum capacity and private capacity of these channels in the entire region of parameter space and also obtain the lower bound for the quantum capacity by calculating the single-shot quantum capacity numerically. In conjunction with previous results on depolarizing channels, our result is one step forward for determining the capacities of the full Pauli channel.
A new upper bound for the quantum capacity of the d-dimensional depolarizing channels is presented. Our derivation makes use of a flagged extension of the map where the receiver obtains a copy of a state σ_{0} whenever the messages are transmitted without errors, and a copy of a state σ_{1}, when instead the original state gets fully depolarized. By varying the overlap between the flag states, the resulting transformation nicely interpolates between the depolarizing map (when σ_{0}=σ_{1}), and the d-dimensional erasure channel (when σ_{0} and σ_{1} have orthogonal support). We find sufficient conditions for degradability of the flagged channel, which let us calculate its quantum capacity in a suitable parameter region. From this last result we get the upper bound for the depolarizing channel, which by a direct comparison appears to be tighter than previous available results for d>2, and for d=2 it is tighter in an intermediate regime of noise. In particular, in the limit of large d values, our findings present a previously unnoticed O(1) correction.
The quantum capacity captures the value of a quantum channel for transmitting quantum information, establishing the fundamental limits on quantum communication. In spite of its central role in quantum information theory, the quantum capacity of most channels is unknown, with wide gaps between the best upper and lower bounds. Even deciding whether a channel has nonzero capacity -- finding its capacity threshold -- is difficult. In this paper we report significant increases in the capacity thresholds of two prototypical noise models: the depolarizing channel and Pauli channels. In the case of the depolarizing channel, this is the first improvement in 18 years, giving a bigger increase beyond the hashing bound than all previous improvements combined. Our starting point is the representation theoretic framework recently proposed by Bhalerao and Leditzky (2025) to compute coherent information for special permutation invariant states. We generalize their framework to the full symmetric subspace, which allow us to optimize coherent information over rank two states in that space. A representation theoretic calculation shows that exponentially many Kraus operators of the channel annihilate the symmetric space, corresponding to a massive decrease in environment entropy for states on the symmetric space compared to the maximally mixed state. This explains the enhanced coherent information as a manifestation of degeneracy for the resulting codes.
Abstract Finding the classical capacity of a quantum channel is not easy, yet we are able to analytically calculate this capacity for new channels. We analyze the bounds of the Holevo capacity and classical capacity for the generalized Pauli channels. In particular, by generalizing earlier results for the Weyl channels, we obtain the lower and upper bounds of the Holevo capacity and show that, if these bounds coincide, the Holevo capacity is weakly additive. We also prove the weak additivity of the lower bound. Two new examples of the generalized Pauli channels with known classical capacity are presented. Finally, we relate the change rate of the classical capacity to the P-divisibility of Pauli channels.
The quantum capacity of a noisy quantum channel determines the maximal rate at which we can code reliably over asymptotically many uses of the channel, and it characterizes the channel's ultimate ability to transmit quantum information coherently. In this paper, we derive single-letter upper bounds on the quantum and private capacities of quantum channels. The quantum capacity of a quantum channel is always no larger than the quantum capacity of its extended channels, since the extensions of the channel can be considered as assistance from the environment. By optimizing the parametrized extended channels with specific structures such as the flag structure, we obtain new upper bounds on the quantum capacity of the original quantum channel. Furthermore, we extend our approach to estimating the fundamental limits of private communication and one-way entanglement distillation. As notable applications, we establish improved upper bounds to the quantum and private capacities for fundamental quantum channels of interest in quantum information, some of which are also the sources of noise in superconducting quantum computing. In particular, our upper bounds on the quantum capacities of the depolarizing channel and the generalized amplitude damping channel are strictly better than previously best-known bounds for certain regimes.
In this article we consider flagged extensions of convex combination of quantum channels, and find general sufficient conditions for the degradability of the flagged extension. An immediate application is a bound on the quantum Q and private P capacities of any channel being a mixture of a unitary map and another channel, with the probability associated to the unitary component being larger than 1/2 . We then specialize our sufficient conditions to flagged Pauli channels, obtaining a family of upper bounds on quantum and private capacities of Pauli channels. In particular, we establish new state-of-the-art upper bounds on the quantum and private capacities of the depolarizing channel, BB84 channel and generalized amplitude damping channel. Moreover, the flagged construction can be naturally applied to tensor powers of channels with less restricting degradability conditions, suggesting that better upper bounds could be found by considering a larger number of channel uses.