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arXiv:2511.09417 · Physical Review A

Weight-based measure of quantum memory as a universal and operational benchmark

Jinghang Zhang, Yu Luo

quant-phSubmitted Nov 12, 2025• Announced Nov 13, 2025• 1 citation• Revised Dec 9, 2025 (v2)
v1 · Nov 12, 2025v2 · Dec 9, 2025
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Abstract

Quantum memory plays a critical role in quantum communication, sensing, and computation. However, studies on quantum memory under a unified benchmarking framework remain scarce. In this paper, we propose a weight-based quantifier as a benchmarking method to evaluate the performance advantage of quantum memory in nonlocal exclusion tasks. We establish a general lower bound for the weight-based measure of quantum memory. Moreover, this measure provides fundamental theoretical bounds for transforming a general channel into an ideal quantum memory. Finally, we present explicit calculations of the weight-based quantifier for various channels, including unitary channels, depolarizing channels, maximal replacement channels, stochastic damping channels, and erasure channels.

Journal reference
Physical Review A 112,062408 (2025)
DOI
10.1103/9fj9-x3v6
Comments
14 pages, 3 figures

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Quantum memory plays a critical role in quantum communication, sensing, and computation. However, studies on quantum memory under a unified benchmarking framework remain scarce. In this paper, we propose a weight-based quantifier as a benchmarking method to evaluate the performance advantage of quantum memory in nonlocal exclusion tasks. We establish a general lower bound for the weight-based measure of quantum memory. Moreover, this measure provides fundamental theoretical bounds for transforming a general channel into an ideal quantum memory. Finally, we present explicit calculations of the weight-based quantifier for various channels, including unitary channels, depolarizing channels, maximal replacement channels, stochastic damping channels, and erasure channels.
Quantum memories are key ingredients for future quantum networks. Developing methods for their certification is therefore an important, yet challenging, problem. In this work, we present a general framework for certifying quantum memories and quantifying their performance in an operational and efficient manner, taking advantage of developments in the theory of quantum channels. We start by giving a pedagogical introduction to these concepts and tools and illustrate their natural application to quantum memories. Specifically, we quantify the fidelity of a quantum memory via the notion of average channel fidelity, which can be estimated precisely in an experiment via a finite set of probe states forming a so-called 222-design. We then present a number of witnessing techniques for certifying this quantity, and show that it gives access to other important properties of the channel, such as its dimensionality and its capacity to transmit quantum information. We consider mostly a simple prepare-and-measure scenario, but discuss also the case of an entanglement-based setup, as well as a semi-device-independent approach. Finally, we apply these methods to a solid-state quantum memory experiment, certifying an average channel fidelity of 98.6%. Our certification methods can be readily applied to other quantum devices, such as fibers, transducers and gates.
Abstract Quantum memory—the capacity to faithfully preserve quantum coherence and correlations—is essential for quantum-enhanced technology. There is thus a pressing need for operationally meaningful means to benchmark candidate memories across diverse physical platforms. Here we introduce a universal benchmark distinguished by its relevance across multiple key operational settings, exactly quantifying (1) the memory’s robustness to noise, (2) the number of noiseless qubits needed for its synthesis, (3) its potential to speed up statistical sampling tasks, and (4) performance advantage in non-local games beyond classical limits. The measure is analytically computable for low-dimensional systems and can be efficiently bounded in the experiment without tomography. We thus illustrate quantum memory as a meaningful resource, with our benchmark reflecting both its cost of creation and what it can accomplish. We demonstrate the benchmark on the five-qubit IBM Q hardware, and apply it to witness the efficacy of error-suppression techniques and quantify non-Markovian noise. We thus present an experimentally accessible, practically meaningful, and universally relevant quantifier of a memory’s capability to preserve quantum advantage.
Quantum memory -- the capacity to store and faithfully recover unknown quantum states -- is essential for any quantum technology to exhibit operational advantage. There is thus great value in identifying physically meaningful means to benchmark candidate quantum memories against each other across diverse operational settings. Here we introduce the robustness of quantum memory, and prove that it satisfies all the mathematical properties we expect of a bona-fide resource-theoretic measure of a system's capacity to retain non-classical information. We demonstrate its operational meaning as a resource in three different settings: (1) the resource cost of synthesising the memory with idealised qubit memories, (2) the resource cost of simulating the memory's observational statistics with classical resources, and (3) the performance of the memory in discriminating different input states. We illustrate an efficient semi-definite program to estimate the robustness of quantum memory, and show that it can be lower bounded with a single witness or purity measurement. Our results thus provide an experimentally accessible and operationally meaningful quantifier of the resources behind preserving quantum information.
Erasing memory is a fundamental operational task in quantum information processing, governed by Landauer's principle, which links information loss to thermodynamic work. We introduce and analyze assisted quantum erasure, where correlations with a remote system reduce the energetic cost of resetting a memory. We identify exclusive control of erasure as the central operational requirement: only a designated party should be able to achieve the minimal cost, whereas any adversary must fail. In the device-dependent regime, we show that entanglement of formation exactly characterizes exclusivity, establishing entanglement as the decisive thermodynamic resource. Moving to a one-sided device-independent scenario, in which only the memory holder's device is trusted, we develop an operational erasure protocol based on random dephasing and conditional operations. Finally, in a fully device-independent setting, we show how Bell nonlocality and self-testing translate observed violations into lower bounds on any adversary's erasure capability, yielding a device-independent notion of exclusive thermodynamic control. Taken together, these results elevate quantum erasure from a thermodynamic constraint to an operational primitive: the erasure work cost quantifies secure, exclusive control over quantum memory, ensuring that an unauthorized agent cannot fully erase information under a bounded work budget.
We introduce the resource quantifier of weight of resource for convex quantum resource theories of states and measurements with arbitrary resources. We show that it captures the advantage that a resourceful state (measurement) offers over all possible free states (measurements) in the operational task of exclusion of subchannels (states). Furthermore, we introduce information-theoretic quantities related to exclusion for quantum channels and find a connection between the weight of resource of a measurement and the exclusion-type information of quantum-to-classical channels. Our results apply to the resource theory of entanglement in which the weight of resource is known as the best-separable approximation or Lewenstein-Sanpera decomposition introduced in 1998. Consequently, the results found here provide an operational interpretation to this 21-year-old entanglement quantifier.
We consider the quantum resource theory of measurement informativeness and introduce a weight-based quantifier of informativeness. We show that this quantifier has operational significance from the perspective of quantum state exclusion, by showing that it precisely captures the advantage a measurement provides in minimising the error in this game. We furthermore introduce information theoretic quantities related to exclusion, in particular the notion of excludible information of a quantum channel, and show that for the case of quantum-to-classical channels it is determined precisely by the weight of informativeness. This establishes a three-way correspondence which sits in parallel to the recently discovered correspondence in quantum resource theories between robustness-based quantifiers, discrimination games, and accessible information. We conjecture that the new correspondence between a weight-based quantifier and an exclusion-based task found in this work is a generic correspondence that holds in the context of quantum resource theories.