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arXiv:2606.05032

Gaussian mean width strong converse bound on the classical identification capacity of quantum channels

Satvik Singh

quant-phcs.ITmath.MGSubmitted Jun 3, 2026• Announced Jun 4, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We establish a single-letter and efficiently computable strong converse bound on the classical identification capacity of quantum channels. By equipping the $n$-fold channel output space with a product state-weighted $σ$-Euclidean geometry, we allow trace-distance separation constraints for identification codes to be controlled by Euclidean covering estimates. Using Sudakov's inequality, we bound the covering numbers of the $n$-fold channel outputs via their Gaussian mean widths in the weighted geometry, whose exponential growth in $n$ is governed by the operator norm of a single-letter positive operator. Upon optimizing over all weighing states $σ$, this yields a strong converse bound on the identification capacity of the channel, which also admits a semidefinite representation. Our method improves the best known converse bounds on the identification capacity of several important examples, such as depolarizing, Pauli, erasure, and amplitude damping channels. We also discuss extensions of this method to more general Euclidean geometries on the output space.

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We establish a single-letter and efficiently computable strong converse bound on the classical identification capacity of quantum channels. By equipping the nnn-fold channel output space with a product state-weighted σσσ-Euclidean geometry, we allow trace-distance separation constraints for identification codes to be controlled by Euclidean covering estimates. Using Sudakov's inequality, we bound the covering numbers of the nnn-fold channel outputs via their Gaussian mean widths in the weighted geometry, whose exponential growth in nnn is governed by the operator norm of a single-letter positive operator. Upon optimizing over all weighing states σσσ, this yields a strong converse bound on the identification capacity of the channel, which also admits a semidefinite representation. Our method improves the best known converse bounds on the identification capacity of several important examples, such as depolarizing, Pauli, erasure, and amplitude damping channels. We also discuss extensions of this method to more general Euclidean geometries on the output space.
A strong converse bound for the classical identification capacity of a quantum channel is an upper bound on the asymptotic identification rate of classical messages sent through the channel, such that, above this rate, the probability of an identification error necessarily converges to one. Converse bounds for identification are notoriously difficult to obtain for fully quantum channels. The only previously known converse bound, due to Atif, Pradhan and Winter [Int.~J.~Quantum Inf.~22(5):2440013, 2024], has the unsatisfactory feature of remaining strictly positive even for a completely noisy channel, for which identification is clearly impossible. We derive strong (and hence also weak) converse bounds, for the qubit depolarizing channel with noise parameter ppp, that vanish as p→1p\to 1p→1, thereby yielding the correct behavior in the completely noisy limit. Moreover, in the setting of simultaneous classical identification under the constraint of complete product measurements, our converse bound matches the corresponding achievability bound, and establishes that in this case the identification capacity equals the classical capacity of the channel.
The quantum capacity of a noisy channel quantifies the maximum rate at which quantum information can be transmitted reliably. For general channels, its evaluation requires an optimization over arbitrarily many channel uses. Degradable channels form a central exception: their capacity is given by the single-letter coherent information, while antidegradable channels have zero capacity. Nevertheless, even for these fundamental classes, it has remained open whether communication above capacity becomes possible when a fixed non-maximal error is tolerated. Here we resolve this problem by proving an exponential strong converse for every finite-dimensional degradable and antidegradable channel: at any rate above capacity, the fidelity of every coding scheme decays exponentially with the number of channel uses. As an immediate consequence, we establish the first all-code exponential strong converse for the quantum erasure channel throughout its full parameter range, strengthening previous results that applied only to almost all codes. We also show that exponential strong-converse bounds are preserved under receiver post-processing. This yields efficiently computable semidefinite-programming bounds for arbitrary finite-dimensional channels, improved bounds for Pauli channels, and an exact exponential strong converse for a nondegradable multilevel amplitude-damping family.
Classical identification via a noisy channel is a communication task in which the receiver is not required to reconstruct the full transmitted message, but only to decide whether it coincides with a message of interest. This relaxation allows the number of identifiable messages to grow doubly exponentially with the blocklength. For quantum channels, the resulting (doubly exponential) identification capacity CIDC_{\mathrm{ID}}CID​ can strictly exceed the ordinary (exponential) transmission capacity CCC. In this paper, we prove that the entanglement-assisted transmission capacity CEC_ECE​ is a strong converse bound for this task: CID≤CEC_{\mathrm{ID}}\leq C_ECID​≤CE​. For sufficiently low-noise channels, this bound can also be achieved via the Hayden-Winter (quantum) identification + fingerprinting codes. This yields an exact characterization CID=CEC_{\mathrm{ID}}=C_ECID​=CE​ of identification capacity for such channels. However, for general channels, we prove that this upper bound can be strict. We exhibit an explicit family of transpose-depolarizing channels for which CID<CEC_{\mathrm{ID}}<C_ECID​<CE​. As a consequence, we also obtain the first example of strict superadditivity of the identification capacity CIDC_{\mathrm{ID}}CID​.
The classical capacity of a quantum channel generally requires regularization because input codewords may be entangled across channel uses. We remove this regularization for generalized amplitude-damping channels (GADCs) and determine their exact strong-converse exponent throughout the full parameter range. The exponent is a single-letter transform of the sandwiched Rényi Holevo information and is attained by product input codewords with collective decoding. The key ingredient is a decomposition of the joint output into positive operators whose triangular factors have identical scalar Gram matrices after norm compression. A sharp triangular Schatten-norm compression inequality then establishes maximum output norm multiplicativity for diagonally sandwiched GADCs tensored with arbitrary completely positive maps. This yields additivity of the sandwiched Rényi Holevo information at every order above one. Consequently, the classical capacity equals the known one-copy Holevo information and admits a scalar optimization. Thus, entangled input codewords improve neither the capacity nor the optimal exponential decay of decoding success above capacity.
We investigate converse bounds on the average decoding error probability in finite-blocklength classical-quantum channel coding. We first present a lower bound for multiple quantum hypothesis testing in terms of pairwise trace distances and derive a corresponding fidelity bound. We then obtain a spectrum-based converse that depends only on the a priori probabilities and spectra of the states. We show that the converse bound remains tight for the quantum depolarizing channel under suitable conditions. For codes with product-state outputs, this converse takes an explicit form involving products of output-state eigenvalues. We apply it to binary codes over the quantum amplitude damping channel using the input states ∣+⟩\vert+\rangle∣+⟩ and ∣−⟩\vert-\rangle∣−⟩. For this setting, we also discuss a normal approximation to the spectrum-based converse in the large blocklength regime. In all numerical examples considered, the spectrum-based converse is tighter than the other converse bounds at low noise levels.
We prove an exponential strong converse for the unassisted private capacity of every finite-dimensional degradable quantum channel. We use a single error criterion: the infidelity between the actual message-estimate-environment state and an ideal state consisting of uniformly distributed, perfectly correlated messages that are independent of the environment. At every rate strictly above the channel's maximum coherent information, the optimized fidelity to this ideal state decays exponentially in the number of channel uses. The same bound holds when the ideal environment state is fixed to the actual environment marginal. The proof applies to arbitrary mixed-state encoders and arbitrary collective decoders. Its main operator ingredient is an overlap bound for privacy tests: two receiver placements with a common subsystem of dimension dCd_CdC​ have overlap at most dC/Md_C/MdC​/M, where MMM is the key size, independently of both shield dimensions. We combine this bound with the signed averaging construction presented in arXiv:2608.01308 and a single-filter reduction to symmetric states. A Gaussian filter replaces the common receiver subsystem by a system of controlled dimension from which the original correlations can be approximately recovered using quantum side information. The filter preserves exact exchange symmetry, and a uniform smooth-entropy estimate bounds its output dimension for arbitrary correlated channel inputs. We also obtain an exponential strong converse at zero for antidegradable channels under the same joint criterion and, consequently, for the private capacity of the quantum erasure channel throughout its parameter range.