An important part of the information theory folklore had been about the output statistics of codes that achieve the capacity and how the empirical distributions compare to the output distributions induced by the optimal input in the channel capacity problem. Results for a variety of such empirical output distributions of good codes have been known in the literature, such as the comparison of the output distribution of the code to the optimal output distribution in vanishing and non-vanishing error probability cases. Motivated by these, we aim to achieve similar results for the quantum codes that are used for classical communication, that is the setting in which the classical messages are communicated through quantum codewords that pass through a noisy quantum channel. We first show the uniqueness of the optimal output distribution, to be able to talk more concretely about the optimal output distribution. Then, we extend the vanishing error probability results to the quantum case, by using techniques that are close in spirit to the classical case. We also extend non-vanishing error probability results to the quantum case on block codes, by using the second-order converses for such codes based on hypercontractivity results for the quantum generalized depolarizing semi-groups.
An important part of the information theory folklore had been about the output statistics of codes that achieve the capacity and how the empirical distributions compare to the output distributions induced by the optimal input in the channel capacity problem. Results for a variety of such empirical output distributions of good codes have been known in the literature, such as the comparison of the output distribution of the code to the optimal output distribution in vanishing and non-vanishing error probability cases. Motivated by these, we aim to achieve similar results for the quantum codes that are used for classical communication, that is the setting in which the classical messages are communicated through quantum codewords that pass through a noisy quantum channel. We first show the uniqueness of the optimal output distribution, to be able to talk more concretely about the optimal output distribution. Then, we extend the vanishing error probability results to the quantum case, by using techniques that are close in spirit to the classical case. We also extend non-vanishing error probability results to the quantum case on block codes, by using the second-order converses for such codes based on hypercontractivity results for the quantum generalized depolarizing semi-groups.
While the ultimate limits on the rate of quantum communication over noisy channels are well-established, very few efficient coding schemes achieving these limits are known. This contrasts sharply with transmitting classical data over classical channels, where polar codes and low-density parity-check codes both efficiently achieve the classical capacity of any noisy channel. In this work we construct an efficient entanglement generation scheme which achieves the coherent information for a broad class of channels. For degradable channels in the class, which includes truncated versions of the pure loss Bosonic channel, the resulting scheme achieves the quantum capacity. The construction makes use of polar codes for two kinds of classical-input, quantum-output (CQ) channels: those with commuting outputs and those whose outputs are heralded mixtures of pure states. The former case is amenable to decoding by classical polar decoding algorithms, the latter by the belief propagation with quantum messages (BPQM) algorithm. To our knowledge, this construction is the first explicit and efficiently decodable protocol that achieves the energy-constrained quantum capacity of the pure-loss Bosonic channel.
We consider the quantum decoding problem. It consists in recovering a codeword given a superposition of noisy versions of this codeword. By measuring the superposition, we get back to the classical decoding problem. It appears for the first time in Chen, Liu and Zhandry’s work showing a quantum advantage for the Short Integer Solution (SIS) problem for thel∞norm. In a recent paper, Chailloux and Tillich proved that when we have a noise following a Bernoulli distribution, the quantum decoding problem can be solved in polynomial time and is therefore easier than classical decoding for which the best known algorithms have an exponential complexity. They also give an information theoretic limit for the code rate at which this problem can be solved which turns out to be above the Shannon limit. In this paper, we generalize the last result to all memoryless noise models. We also show similar results in the rank metric case which corresponds to a noise model which is not memoryless. We analyze the Pretty Good Measurement, from which we derive an information theoretic limit for this problem. By using the algorithm for the quantum decoding problem together with Regev’s reduction, we derive a quantum algorithm sampling codewords from the dual code according to a probability distribution which is the dual of the original noise. It turns out that at the information theoretic limit, we get the most likely nonzero codeword of the dual code. When the distribution is a decreasing function of the weight, we find minimal nonzero codewords. Note that Regev’s reduction used together with classical decoding is much less satisfying since it is not able to output those minimum weight codewords.
A quantum channel can transmit quantum states, classical messages, or classical messages that remain secret from its environment. We prove exponential strong converses for all three tasks over arbitrary finite-dimensional memoryless quantum channels, at their respective regularized capacities and allowing arbitrary entangled inputs across channel uses and joint decoding. Above quantum or classical capacity, entanglement fidelity or decoding success probability, respectively, decays exponentially with the number of channel uses. Above private capacity, fidelity to an ideal shared secret key decays exponentially; in particular, vanishing secrecy error forces decoding success to vanish. The proofs combine one-shot quantum blowing-up lemmas, which convert codes with low success into reliable codes with a controlled loss in code size, with a low-degree polynomial approximation of the channel's Stinespring image projector. The loss is governed by the projective tensor norm of the approximation across the receiver--environment bipartition. For memoryless channels, the polynomial construction gives exponential accuracy while keeping the rate loss arbitrarily small, turning the corresponding weak converses into strong converses.
Channel capacities quantify the optimal rates of sending information reliably over noisy channels. Usually, the study of capacities assumes that the circuits which the sender and receiver use for encoding and decoding consist of perfectly noiseless gates. In the case of communication over quantum channels, however, this assumption is widely believed to be unrealistic, even in the long-term, due to the fragility of quantum information, which is affected by the process of decoherence. Christandl and Müller-Hermes have therefore initiated the study of fault-tolerant channel coding for quantum channels, i.e. coding schemes where encoder and decoder circuits are affected by noise, and have used techniques from fault-tolerant quantum computing to establish coding theorems for sending classical and quantum information in this scenario. Here, we extend these methods to the case of entanglement-assisted communication, in particular proving that the fault-tolerant capacity approaches the usual capacity when the gate error approaches zero. A main tool, which might be of independent interest, is the introduction of fault-tolerant entanglement distillation. We furthermore focus on the modularity of the techniques used, so that they can be easily adopted in other fault-tolerant communication scenarios.
We prove a strong converse for quantum communication over Pauli channels within the class of stabilizer codes. If a code whose code space is a full joint eigenspace of a stabilizer group transmits above the coherent information of its own input state, its entanglement fidelity decays exponentially in the block length; the encoder may be any isometry onto that space and the decoder any channel. For memoryless channels this determines the ε-quantum capacity of the class for every ε<1, so that tolerating a constant error buys no rate; for antidegradable channels, such as the depolarizing channel with error probability p∈[1/4,3/4], that capacity is zero, while for p∈[1/4,1/2) partial-transposition bounds provably cannot certify a strong converse. The proof uses neither additivity assumptions nor semidefinite relaxations: optimal decoding succeeds precisely on an event in a product probability space, so the blowing-up lemma of Ahlswede, Gács and Körner applies, and the side information it produces is charged against the coherent information. The argument also constrains near-deterministic decoding for codes of any kind, and we isolate the encoder-side statement that would extend it to all of them.
Channel resolvability concerns the minimum resolution for approximating the channel output. We study the resolvability of classical-quantum channels in two settings, for the channel output generated from the worst input, and from the fixed independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) input. The direct part of the worst-input setting is derived from sequential hypothesis testing as it involves non-i.i.d. inputs. The strong converse of the worst-input setting is obtained via the connection to identification codes. For the fixed-input setting, while the direct part follows from the known quantum soft covering result, we exploit the recent alternative quantum Sanov theorem to prove the strong converse.