Phase retrievability of a quantum channel asks whether pure states can be reconstructed from suitable measurements. In this paper, we study this problem from three complementary viewpoints: quantum information theory, operator-valued frames, and the physical realization through quantum interferometry. We first show that a quantum channel is phase retrievable if and only if its complementary channel is pure-state informationally complete. This structural characterization leads to several consequences for phase retrievability, including criteria involving the dimension of the complementary operator system, Choi-rank type bounds, and specific results for entanglement breaking channels and twirling channels.
We then introduce an interferometric coupling in which two arm channels are coherently recombined through port operators \(M_i(θ)=A_i+e^{iθ}B_i\). Unlike classical mixing, this construction produces interference cross terms that can enlarge the complementary operator system and thereby enhance phase retrievability. From the frame theory viewpoint, the interferometer realizes a coherent coupling of operator-valued frames. To quantify this effect, we introduce injectivity indices for completely positive maps. The examples in Section~5 show that coherent interference can significantly improve phase retrieval behavior even when the arm channels are individually not phase retrievable.
Phase retrievability of a quantum channel asks whether pure states can be reconstructed from suitable measurements. In this paper, we study this problem from three complementary viewpoints: quantum information theory, operator-valued frames, and the physical realization through quantum interferometry. We first show that a quantum channel is phase retrievable if and only if its complementary channel is pure-state informationally complete. This structural characterization leads to several consequences for phase retrievability, including criteria involving the dimension of the complementary operator system, Choi-rank type bounds, and specific results for entanglement breaking channels and twirling channels.
We then introduce an interferometric coupling in which two arm channels are coherently recombined through port operators (M_i(θ)=A_i+e^{iθ}B_i). Unlike classical mixing, this construction produces interference cross terms that can enlarge the complementary operator system and thereby enhance phase retrievability. From the frame theory viewpoint, the interferometer realizes a coherent coupling of operator-valued frames. To quantify this effect, we introduce injectivity indices for completely positive maps. The examples in Section~5 show that coherent interference can significantly improve phase retrieval behavior even when the arm channels are individually not phase retrievable.
This survey introduces the role of frame phase retrieval in pure-state identification and information preservation by quantum channels. For unit vectors, the lift x↦xx∗ identifies vectors that differ only by a global phase with the same rank-one quantum state, converts frame intensities into linear functionals of the lifted state, and makes the adjoint pullback of output observables an operator-valued measurement on the input system. From this viewpoint, a channel is phase retrievable exactly when it is injective on pure states. We develop this correspondence through Choi-rank-two linear combinations of Kraus operators, higher-rank relative spectra, structural obstructions, and constructions with prescribed Choi rank. We distinguish injective identification from full tomography, perfect one-shot discrimination, zero-error classical communication, and exact quantum correction. Twirling channels then provide a structured setting in which commutants, irreducible dimensions, multiplicities, orbit-frame orthogonality, coding indices, and phase-retrievable subspaces can be read from group representations.
We continue the study of Phase Retrieval in the Quantum Information setting in the style of \cite{liu2023phase}, in a manner which is more general in two primary ways: (a) Instead of only pure states we consider also states (and positive semidefinite operators) of bounded rank, as is done in Quantum Tomography; (b) We consider general super operators instead of only quantum channels.
We show that in order to have phase retrieval with respect to positive semidefinite operators of bounded rank, it suffices to discriminate between perfectly distinguishable pairs (i.e. those with orthogonal supports). From this we prove that phase retrievability is always Lipschitz stable with respect to the trace norm, and then we use the Fuchs-van de Graaf inequalities to deduce stability with respect to the Bures--Wasserstein distance (thus generalizing the known stability results for phase retrieval in Frame Theory). For Hermitian-preserving super operators taking values in block-diagonal matrices, we characterize phase retrievability in terms of conditions inspired by the classical complement property from Frame Theory.
This thesis investigates the preservation of fundamental quantum properties under noisy quantum processes. Motivated by the challenges of maintaining coherence and information integrity in realistic quantum systems, we study three distinct structural properties: phase retrievability, orbit injectivity, and fidelity preservation. Each property reflects a unique facet of how quantum information can be robustly encoded, distinguished, or compared in the presence of environmental interactions. In the first part of the thesis, we analyze phase retrievable quantum channels which allow recovery of a quantum state up to a global phase. We provide structural characterizations using the Kraus representation and the joint spectrum of the Kraus operators. We then extend this study to orbit-injective channels, which distinguish quantum states up to more general group actions. This generalization captures symmetry-induced ambiguities and deepens the understanding of information distinguishability in structured quantum systems. The second part focuses on fidelity, a widely used measure of quantum similarity. We explore conditions under which mixed unitary quantum channels preserve fidelity between quantum states. These investigations reveal how fidelity preservation can constrain the structure of a quantum channel, providing insight into error tolerance and stability in quantum communication. Together, these results contribute to a unified perspective on how different aspects of quantum information-state reconstruction, distinguishability, and similarity-can be maintained under noise, offering both theoretical insight and tools for practical quantum technologies.
Transmitting quantum information across quantum channels is an important task. However quantum information is delicate, and is easily corrupted. We address the task of protecting quantum information from an information theoretic perspective -- we encode some message qudits into a quantum code, send the encoded quantum information across the noisy quantum channel, then recover the message qudits by decoding. In this dissertation, we discuss the coding problem from several perspectives.} \n \nThe noisy quantum channel is one of the central aspects of the quantum coding problem, and hence quantifying the noisy quantum channel from the physical model is an important problem. \nWe work with an explicit physical model -- a pair of initially decoupled quantum harmonic oscillators interacting with a spring-like coupling, where the bath oscillator is initially in a thermal-like state. In particular, we treat the completely positive and trace preserving map on the system as a quantum channel, and study the truncation of the channel by truncating its Kraus set. We thereby derive the matrix elements of the Choi-Jamiolkowski operator of the corresponding truncated channel, which are truncated transition amplitudes. Finally, we give a computable approximation for these truncated transition amplitudes with explicit error bounds, and perform a case study of the oscillators in the off-resonant and weakly-coupled regime numerically. \n \nIn the context of truncated noisy channels, we revisit the notion of approximate error correction of finite dimension codes. We derive a computationally simple lower bound on the worst case entanglement fidelity of a quantum code, when the truncated recovery map of Leung et. al. is rescaled. As an application, we apply our bound to construct a family of multi-error correcting amplitude damping codes that are permutation-invariant. This demonstrates an explicit example where the specific structure of the noisy channel allows code design out of the stabilizer formalism via purely algebraic means. \n \nWe study lower bounds on the quantum capacity of adversarial channels, where we restrict the selection of quantum codes to the set of concatenated quantum codes. \nThe adversarial channel is a quantum channel where an adversary corrupts a fixed fraction of qudits sent across a quantum channel in the most malicious way possible. The best known rates of communicating over adversarial channels are given by the quantum Gilbert-Varshamov (GV) bound, that is known to be attainable with random quantum codes. We generalize the classical result of Thommesen to the quantum case, thereby demonstrating the existence of concatenated quantum codes that can asymptotically attain the quantum GV bound. The outer codes are quantum generalized Reed-Solomon codes, and the inner codes are random independently chosen stabilizer codes, where the rates of the inner and outer codes lie in a specified feasible region. \n \nWe next study upper bounds on the quantum capacity of some low dimension quantum channels. \nThe quantum capacity of a quantum channel is the maximum rate at which quantum information can be transmitted reliably across it, given arbitrarily many uses of it. While it is known that random quantum codes can be used to attain the quantum capacity, the quantum capacity of many classes of channels is undetermined, even for channels of low input and output dimension. For example, depolarizing channels are \n important quantum channels, but do not have tight numerical bounds. \nWe obtain upper bounds on the quantum capacity of some unital and non-unital channels \n -- two-qubit Pauli channels, two-qubit depolarizing channels, two-qubit locally symmetric channels, \n shifted qubit depolarizing channels, and shifted two-qubit Pauli channels -- \n using the coherent information of some degradable channels. We use the notion \n of twirling quantum channels, and Smith and Smolin's method of constructing \n degradable extensions of quantum channels extensively. The degradable channels we \n introduce, study and use are two-qubit amplitude damping channels. Exploiting the \n notion of covariant quantum channels, we give sufficient conditions for the quantum \n capacity of a degradable channel to be the optimal value of a concave program with \n linear constraints, and show that our two-qubit degradable amplitude damping channels have this property.
The positive-partial-transpose-squared (PPT-squared) conjecture asks whether the composition of two positive-partial-transpose (PPT) quantum channels must be entanglement breaking (EB). The problem remains open in general and, within the diagonal orthogonal covariant (DOC) class, the first unresolved deterministic dimension is four. A sufficient condition for PPT-squared composition is derived for DOC maps in arbitrary finite dimension. The proof isolates the quantum coherence data into two correlation matrices, mixes each with the identity until it lies in the convex hull of rank-one correlation matrices, and converts the resulting objects into an explicit triplewise completely positive (TCP) core. The remaining contribution is purely classical and is TCP whenever a simple entrywise mixing inequality is satisfied. For PPT DOC maps ΦA,B,C and ΦD,E,F on Md, the entrywise bound (AD)ij≥2⌊d⌋AiiAjjDiiDjj for all i,j guarantees that ΦA,B,C∘ΦD,E,F is EB. In dimension four the universal coefficient becomes four. A continuous family of bistochastic PPT channels is then constructed; every member with a=1 is not EB, while every pairwise composition within the family is proved to be EB. A rank-sensitive refinement shows explicitly how low coherence rank can improve the universal coefficient. The resulting certificate is sufficient rather than necessary and is complementary to factor-width and semidefinite-hierarchy approaches.
In the first part of this dissertation a framework for categorizing entropic measures of nonclassical correlations in bipartite quantum states is presented. The measures are based on the difference between a quantum entropic quantity and the corresponding classical quantity obtained from measurements on the two systems. Three types of entropic quantities are used, and three different measurement strategies are applied to these quantities. Many of the resulting measures of nonclassical correlations have been proposed previously. Properties of the various measures are explored, and results of evaluating the measures for two-qubit quantum states are presented. To demonstrate how these measures differ from entanglement we move to the set of Bell-diagonal states for two qubits, which can be depicted as a tetrahedron in three dimensions. We consider the level surfaces of entanglement and of the correlation measures from our framework for Bell-diagonal states. This provides a complete picture of the structure of entanglement and discord for this simple case and, in particular, of their nonanalytic behavior under decoherence. The pictorial approach also indicates how to show that all of the proposed correlation measures are neither convex nor concave. In the second part we look at two practical interferometric setups that use nonclassical states of light to enhance their performance. First we consider an interferometer powered by laser light (a coherent state) into one input port and ask the following question: what is the best state to inject into the second input port, given a constraint on the mean number of photons this state can carry, in order to optimize the interferometer's phase sensitivity? This question is the practical question for high-sensitivity interferometry. We answer the question by considering the quantum Cram\'er-Rao bound for such a setup. The answer is squeezed vacuum. Then we analyze the ultimate bounds on the phase sensitivity of an interferometer, given the constraint that the state input to the interferometer's initial 50:50 beam splitter B is a product state of the two input modes. Requiring a product state is a natural restriction: if one were allowed to input an arbitrary, entangled two-mode state ∣Ξ⟩ to the beam splitter, one could generally just as easily input the state B∣Ξ⟩ directly into the two modes after the beam splitter, thus rendering the beam splitter unnecessary. We find optimal states for a fixed photon number and for a fixed mean photon number. Our results indicate that entanglement is not a crucial resource for quantum-enhanced interferometry. Initially the analysis for both of these setups is performed for the idealized case of a lossless interferometer. Then the analysis is extended to the more realistic scenario where the interferometer suffers from photon losses.