I study the problem of optimally discriminating between two open quantum dynamical processes in a single-shot scenario, with the aim of minimizing the error probability of identification. This task requires jointly optimising the input state—potentially entangled with an ancillary system isolated from the dynamics—and the time at which the resulting time-dependent quantum channels, generated by the two dynamical maps, are most distinguishable. As an illustrative case, I focus on Pauli dynamical maps and their associated families of time-dependent Pauli channels. I identify a regime in which separable strategies require waiting indefinitely until the dynamics reaches the stationary state, whereas entangled input states enable optimal discrimination at a finite time, with a strict reduction in error probability. These results highlight the crucial interplay between entanglement and timing in enhancing the distinguishability of quantum dynamical processes.
I study the problem of optimally discriminating between two open quantum dynamical processes in a single-shot scenario, with the aim of minimizing the error probability of identification. This task requires jointly optimising the input state—potentially entangled with an ancillary system isolated from the dynamics—and the time at which the resulting time-dependent quantum channels, generated by the two dynamical maps, are most distinguishable. As an illustrative case, I focus on Pauli dynamical maps and their associated families of time-dependent Pauli channels. I identify a regime in which separable strategies require waiting indefinitely until the dynamics reaches the stationary state, whereas entangled input states enable optimal discrimination at a finite time, with a strict reduction in error probability. These results highlight the crucial interplay between entanglement and timing in enhancing the distinguishability of quantum dynamical processes.
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.
Entanglement is known to be a powerful resource that improves performance in various quantum information and computational tasks. A standard example of such a phenomenon is the possibility of perfectly discriminating all four Pauli operations in a single shot via the superdense coding protocol. While entanglement is often a powerful resource for quantum channel discrimination, this is not necessarily the case. In this work, we identify scenarios in which the maximally entangled state is a bad choice of input state and, more generally, show that excessive entanglement can reduce channel discriminability dramatically. To do so, we present an explicit pair of unitary channels which are perfectly discriminable without entanglement, but for which any strategy with maximally entangled input states is ε-close to a blind uniform guessing strategy. To develop a systematic approach, we introduce the concepts of Maximal Entanglement Worst Case (MEWC) and Maximal Entanglement Best Case (MEBC) pairs of channels, and present conditions for a pair of channels to be MEWC or MEBC. With these conditions, we show that the optimal input states for discriminating MEWC pairs of channels are necessarily separable, and provide non-trivial examples of measurement channels for which entanglement necessarily reduces the maximum probability of discrimination.
We analyze minimum-error discrimination of two qubit dynamical processes generated by phase-covariant amplitude-damping Lindbladians in a single-use scenario. The optimization involves both the input probe, possibly entangled with an isolated ancilla, and the interrogation time. For unassisted probes we obtain a closed expression for the optimal trace-norm distinguishability at fixed time, with distinct interior and boundary branches. For entanglement-assisted probes, the common phase covariance of the two channels reduces the diamond-norm optimization to a one-parameter Schmidt family. The resulting formula gives transparent sufficient conditions for fixed-time entanglement advantage and separates this local advantage from advantage after global optimization over time. We exhibit examples in which the best unassisted strategy is approached only asymptotically, whereas an entangled probe achieves a strictly smaller error probability at finite time.
Single-shot quantum channel discrimination is the fundamental task of determining, given only a single use, which of two known quantum channels is acting on a system. In this thesis we investigate the well-known phenomenon that entanglement to an auxiliary system can provide an advantage in this task. In particular, we consider the questions: (1) How much entanglement is in general necessary to achieve an optimal discrimination strategy? (2) What is the maximal advantage provided by entanglement? \n \nGiven a linear map Ψ : L(Cn) → L(Cm), its multiplicity maps are defined as the family of linear maps Ψ ⊗ 1L(Ck) : L(Cn ⊗ Ck) → L(Cm ⊗ Ck), where 1L(Ck) is the identity on L(Ck). Due to the Holevo-Helstrom theorem, the optimal performance using an auxiliary system of dimension k is quantified in terms of the norm of Ψ⊗1L(Ck), where Ψ is a linear map that depends on the parameters of the discrimination problem. Hence, the advantage provided by entanglement is represented in the growth of the norm of Ψ ⊗ 1L(Ck ) with k, a classic phenomenon in the theory of operator algebras. \n \nWe formalize question (1) by investigating, relative to the input and output dimensions of the channels to be discriminated, how large of an auxiliary system is necessary to achieve an optimal strategy. Mathematically, this is connected to when the norm of Ψ ⊗ 1L(Ck) stops growing with k. It is well- known that an auxiliary system of dimension equal to the input is always sufficient to achieve an optimal strategy, and that this is sometimes necessary when the output dimension is at least as large as the input. We prove that, even when the output dimension is arbitrarily small compared to the input, it is still sometimes necessary to use an auxiliary system as large as the input to achieve an optimal strategy. \n \nFor question (2), we investigate, with respect to a fixed input dimension, how large the gap between the optimal performances with and without entanglement can be. Mathematically, this is quantified by the rate of growth of the norm of Ψ ⊗ 1L(Ck ) in k. It is known that matrix transposition has the fastest possible growth, and we prove that it is essentially the unique linear map with this property. We use this to prove that a discrimination problem defined in terms of the Werner-Holevo channels is essentially the unique game satisfying a norm relation that states that the game can be won with certainty using entanglement, but is hard to win without entanglement. \n \nAlong the way, we prove characterizations of the structure of maximal entanglement, as measured according to the entanglement negativity, as well as relative to a large class of entanglement measures. We also give various characterizations of complete trace-norm isometries, and reversible quantum channels.
Abstract Distinguishing physical processes is one of the fundamental problems in quantum physics. Although distinguishability of quantum preparations and quantum channels have been studied considerably, distinguishability of quantum measurements remains largely unexplored. We investigate the problem of single-shot discrimination of quantum measurements using two strategies, one based on single quantum systems and the other one based on entangled quantum systems. First, we formally define both scenarios. We then construct sets of measurements (including non-projective) in arbitrary finite dimensions that are perfectly distinguishable within the second scenario using quantum entanglement, while not in the one based on single quantum systems. Furthermore, we show that any advantage in measurement discrimination tasks over single systems is a demonstration of Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen ‘quantum steering’. Alongside, we prove that all pure two-qubit entangled states provide an advantage in a measurement discrimination task over one-qubit systems.
The rapid advance of quantum information technology requires precise control and manipulation of quantum systems and of their properties; in particular, it is essential to certify that quantum processors truly work quantum mechanically, in order to validate experiments and their results. The problem of certification of quantum states and devices is a demanding one, thus many attempts have been put forward to find ways of efficiently test their basic functionalities, such as their entanglement properties. The main problems addressed in this thesis concern indeed finding optimal strategies for the estimation and characterization of quantum states and channels, with a special focus on entanglement correlations. In our first work we considered the certification of entanglement across a given partition of a multi-qubit system, when only partial information about the corresponding quantum state is available; we tackled the problem of finding the best measurement strategy introducing the statistics of lengths of measurement sequences, choosing multi-qubit Pauli-measurements as observables. Using a sample of random unknown states, we were able to identify the (on average) shortest, i.e. most efficient, measurement sequence to detect entanglement. The investigation was carried out with an algorithm based on the truncated moment sequences (tms) problem, which provides necessary and sufficient conditions for entanglement or separability of a quantum state of a finite dimensional system. This study results in a very efficient strategy especially for symmetric states, for which only a tiny fraction (10−6) of randomly chosen entangled states are undetected for systems with 6 qubits or more. We continued in our second work with the problem of separability of quantum channels to answer the question whether a given quantum device is able to create entanglement or not. The Choi matrix representation, provided by the Choi–Jamiołkowski isomorphism, casts the problem in terms of systems and ancillas, giving different classes of separability depending on the cut considered between them. Once again, the tms framework turned out to be well suited for this study, giving a unifying approach for the different separability problems; a solution is found in terms of the tms associated to the coordinates of the Choi state, in a fixed basis, and semidefinite programming is used to get a separability certificate. We explored examples of families of 2-qubit and single-qutrit channels, for which our algorithm can give an answer in cases where other criteria remain inconclusive. In a further work we shifted our attention to a different direction, highlighting a connection between the fields of quantum information, Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) and analogue gravity, thus showing the relevance of quantum information notions in a broader context. We studied the entanglement properties of a BEC analogue of a black hole, which is described by a three-mode Gaussian state; we investigated bipartite and tripartite entanglement measures based on the covariance matrix description, both at zero and finite temperature, providing the best experimental configuration for entanglement detection. In a final stage of this thesis, we started looking at different measurement strategies for testing quantum devices whose functionality can be described by a single parameter; we used a Bayesian approach to estimate this parameter, exploiting the information collected through measurements to update a conditional probability distribution, without the need of estimating expected values of observables. The problem of finding the optimal experimental design can be in this case translated in the optimization of a utility function, which usually guides the update process adaptively at each step; we tried to outperform this approach looking ahead not only at the next step, but at a few ones, in order to obtain an answer of correct or wrong functioning as soon as possible. Moreover, we chose the input state for the quantum channel considered minimizing the error probability given by the Chernoff distance between the outputs of an ideal and a faulty channel; finally, we considered two different final decision criteria and compared their efficiency.