We establish an exponential communication advantage enabled by multipartite quantum entanglement. Building on the bipartite Hidden Matching problem, we introduce a communication task involving multiple spatially separated senders and a single receiver. We show that a shared Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state enables completion of this task using only logarithmically many bits of classical communication from each sender. In contrast, without preshared entanglement, any protocol achieving high success probability requires polynomial communication from at least one sender, even when \emph{quantum} communication is allowed. Thus, classical communication assisted by multipartite entanglement can be exponentially more powerful than quantum communication without preshared entanglement. As a cryptographic application, we construct a seeded two-source randomness extractor and establish an exponential separation between entangled and unentangled quantum side-information. Specifically, compromising the extractor with two unentangled quantum states storing information about the two sources, respectively, requires polynomial-size memory, whereas exponentially smaller quantum memory suffices in the presence of a small amount of shared entanglement.
We establish an exponential communication advantage enabled by multipartite quantum entanglement. Building on the bipartite Hidden Matching problem, we introduce a communication task involving multiple spatially separated senders and a single receiver. We show that a shared Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state enables completion of this task using only logarithmically many bits of classical communication from each sender. In contrast, without preshared entanglement, any protocol achieving high success probability requires polynomial communication from at least one sender, even when \emph{quantum} communication is allowed. Thus, classical communication assisted by multipartite entanglement can be exponentially more powerful than quantum communication without preshared entanglement. As a cryptographic application, we construct a seeded two-source randomness extractor and establish an exponential separation between entangled and unentangled quantum side-information. Specifically, compromising the extractor with two unentangled quantum states storing information about the two sources, respectively, requires polynomial-size memory, whereas exponentially smaller quantum memory suffices in the presence of a small amount of shared entanglement.
We investigate the quantum advantage that can arise in typical two-party communication scenarios, where the sender and the receiver are allowed to share prior correlations. Focusing on communication tasks constrained by the distinguishability of the sender's inputs, we demonstrate that entanglement-assisted communication with both classical and quantum message can outperform classical communication supplemented with shared randomness. We begin by developing a general framework for communication tasks with pre-shared correlations. Within this framework, we establish an equivalence among entanglement-assisted classical communication, entanglement-assisted quantum communication, and quantum communication, showing that no hierarchy exists between these three paradigms. We then investigate the scenario where the receiver has no input and prove that no advantage can arise in this case. However, an advantage in the entanglement-assisted setting emerges once additional constraints are imposed on the dimension of the communicated message. This further highlights the superiority of entanglement-assisted classical communication over standard quantum communication. Then we demonstrate several tasks where the entanglement-assisted protocol using one-bit communication proves to be advantageous over classical communication. Finally, by constructing an explicit class of communication tasks, we show that a non-maximally entangled states outperform the maximally entangled state as a pre-shared resource between the communicating parties.
Distributed computing, involving multiple servers collaborating on designated computations, faces a critical challenge in optimizing interserver communication---an issue central to the study of communication complexity. Quantum resources offer advantages over classical methods in addressing this challenge. In this work, we investigate a distributed computing scenario with multiple senders and a single receiver, establishing a scalable advantage of multipartite quantum entanglement in mitigating communication complexity. Specifically, we demonstrate that when the receiver and the senders share a multiqubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state---a quintessential form of genuine multipartite entanglement---certain global functions of the distributed inputs can be computed with only one bit of classical communication from each sender. In contrast, without entanglement, two bits of communication are required from all but one sender. Consequently, quantum entanglement reduces communication overhead by $n\ensuremath{-}1$ bits for n senders, allowing for arbitrary scaling with an increasing number of senders. We also show that the entanglement-based protocol exhibits significant robustness under white noise, thereby establishing the potential for experimental realization of this quantum advantage.
We study the relative power of public randomness and quantum communication in the multiparty Simultaneous Message Passing (SMP) model. By analyzing a total Boolean function and a relational problem, we establish polynomial and exponential separations between classical public-coin protocols and quantum protocols without shared randomness or prior entanglement.
We first introduce XOR Equality, a total Boolean function in which each of k players receives an unrestricted string xj∈{0,1}n, and the referee must decide whether x1⊕⋯⊕xk=0n. For k≥8 and worst-case error at most 1/3, we prove quantum lower bounds of Ω(min{n,k2}) on total communication and Ω(min{n/k,k}) on maximum message length. A classical public-coin protocol uses two bits per player with error at most 1/4. For n=k2 and worst-case error at most 1/3, we prove that quantum protocols require maximum message length Ω(n) qubits, whereas two public-coin bits per player suffice.
We then turn to relations, for which we obtain exponential separations. Specifically, we study Multiparty Index Coordination, a k-player generalization of the two-player relation studied by Gavinsky, Kempe, Regev, and de Wolf (STOC 2006). We prove an unambiguous quantum lower bound of Ω(n1−1/k) on maximum message length, matched by a classical private-coin protocol. For any fixed error ε∈(0,1/8), we also prove a bounded-error quantum lower bound of Ω(n(k−1)/(k+1)) while we show that public-coin protocols solve the relation unambiguously with maximum message length O(logn), giving exponential separations in both regimes. The implicit constants are independent of k, and both quantum lower bounds become linear when k≥clogn for any fixed c>0.
Quantum networks connect systems at separate locations via quantum links, enabling a wide range of quantum information tasks between distant parties. Large-scale networks have the potential to enable global secure communication, distributed quantum computation, enhanced clock synchronization, and high-precision multiparameter metrology. For the optimal development of these technologies, however, it is essential to identify the necessary resources and sub-routines that will lead to the quantum advantage, but this is demanding even for the simplest protocols in quantum information processing. Here we show that quantum networks relying on the long-distance distribution of bipartite entanglement, combined with local operations and shared randomness, cannot achieve a relevant quantum advantage. Specifically, we prove that these networks do not help in preparing resourceful quantum states such as Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states or cluster states, despite the free availability of long-distance entanglement. At an abstract level, our work points towards a fundamental difference between bipartite and multipartite entanglement. From a practical perspective, our results highlight the need for classical communication combined with quantum memories to fully harness the power of quantum networks.
We consider communication scenarios with multiple senders and a single receiver. Focusing on communication tasks where the distinguishability or antidistinguishability of the sender's input is bounded, we show that quantum strategies-without any shared entanglement-can outperform the classical ones. We introduce a systematic technique for deriving the facet inequalities that delineate the polytope of classical correlations in such scenarios. As a proof of principle, we recover the complete set of facet inequalities for some nontrivial scenarios involving two senders and a receiver with no input. Explicit quantum protocols are studied that violate these inequalities, demonstrating quantum advantage. We further investigate the task of antidistinguishing the joint input string held by the senders and derive upper bounds on the optimal classical success probability. Leveraging the Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph theorem, we prove that when each sender has a binary input, the quantum advantage grows with the number of senders. We also provide sufficient conditions for quantum advantage for arbitrary input sizes and illustrate them through several explicit examples.
A central problem in quantum information theory is understanding how quantum resources can be used to communicate information more efficiently than classical resources. We introduce quantum dense network coding -- a protocol that transmits the output of a non-Boolean function to a receiver using provably half as many qubits as bits for each sender by not transmitting the entirety of the function inputs. We show this advantage requires both shared entanglement and quantum communication, is robust to noise, and the gap in success probability between quantum and classical communication can be amplified exponentially in the number of senders. Finally, we show that dense network coding gives rise to a novel, information-theoretically secure, quantum cryptographic protocol, which we call measurement-device-independent quantum key growing.