The quantum capacity captures the value of a quantum channel for transmitting quantum information, establishing the fundamental limits on quantum communication. In spite of its central role in quantum information theory, the quantum capacity of most channels is unknown, with wide gaps between the best upper and lower bounds. Even deciding whether a channel has nonzero capacity -- finding its capacity threshold -- is difficult. In this paper we report significant increases in the capacity thresholds of two prototypical noise models: the depolarizing channel and Pauli channels. In the case of the depolarizing channel, this is the first improvement in 18 years, giving a bigger increase beyond the hashing bound than all previous improvements combined. Our starting point is the representation theoretic framework recently proposed by Bhalerao and Leditzky (2025) to compute coherent information for special permutation invariant states. We generalize their framework to the full symmetric subspace, which allow us to optimize coherent information over rank two states in that space. A representation theoretic calculation shows that exponentially many Kraus operators of the channel annihilate the symmetric space, corresponding to a massive decrease in environment entropy for states on the symmetric space compared to the maximally mixed state. This explains the enhanced coherent information as a manifestation of degeneracy for the resulting codes.
The noise threshold below which the qubit depolarizing channel retains positive quantum capacity has been studied since 1996. The classic constructions come with exact finite formulae, but in every reported threshold to date -- most recently the record of Agarwal et al. -- the final step, the sign of the coherent information at the reported point, is a floating-point evaluation. We give the first exact-arithmetic, independently machine-checkable positivity proofs in this regime: an explicit 45-copy rank-two input state
A, published as a 1,472-byte witness, with certified
Ic>0 at the exact rational
p=16239/250000=0.064956 (per-Pauli convention; total error rate
3p=0.194868) -- beyond both the best value printed in the Agarwal et al. paper (
0.064657) and the strongest state in the same authors' public repository (
≈0.064911), both numerical. Because the depolarizing family is a semigroup under composition, fixed-input coherent information is nonincreasing in
p on
[0,1/4], so a single certified point extends to the entire interval below it. The same machinery confines the positivity boundaries of
A and of the strongest public state of Agarwal et al. to disjoint rational intervals separated by more than
1/25000 -- to our knowledge the first proven ordering of the positivity boundaries of two explicit competing code states. Every computational claim in the paper reduces to a finite list of big-integer comparisons, checkable by a dependency-free few-hundred-line verifier whose soundness rests on three self-contained half-page lemmas. Payloads, certificates, and verifier accompany the paper as a supplementary artifact.
The quantum capacity of the bosonic thermal attenuator, which is given by the regularization of its coherent information, is unknown. The seminal work of Holevo and Werner established in 1999 the standard one-use lower bound obtained from input thermal states. We first prove that this long-standing lower bound is the exact supremum over all single-mode Gaussian states and then show that, crucially, a non-Gaussian state can do better. As a consequence, we prove positivity of the quantum capacity in a parameter region where the channel is not antidegradable, yet its coherent information optimized over single-mode Gaussian states vanishes. For example, with one thermal photon in the environment and at transmissivity
η=0.8, the coherent information is non-positive for every single-mode Gaussian input. We give an explicit rank-two non-Gaussian state, supported on only six Fock levels, whose coherent information is certified to be at least
4.7×10−4 qubits per channel use. This short witness is far from numerically optimal: a numerical optimization over fixed non-Gaussian families reaches at least
8.4×10−3 qubits per channel use at the same point. More generally, at
ν=1, using non-Gaussian inputs we certify positivity of the coherent information, and therefore of the quantum capacity, down to
η=0.7841; by contrast, the channel is antidegradable, and hence has zero quantum capacity, for
η≤0.75. Overall, our work identifies new high-noise regimes in which bosonic quantum communication is possible.
The quantum capacity of a noisy quantum channel determines the maximal rate at which we can code reliably over asymptotically many uses of the channel, and it characterizes the channel's ultimate ability to transmit quantum information coherently. In this paper, we derive single-letter upper bounds on the quantum and private capacities of quantum channels. The quantum capacity of a quantum channel is always no larger than the quantum capacity of its extended channels, since the extensions of the channel can be considered as assistance from the environment. By optimizing the parametrized extended channels with specific structures such as the flag structure, we obtain new upper bounds on the quantum capacity of the original quantum channel. Furthermore, we extend our approach to estimating the fundamental limits of private communication and one-way entanglement distillation. As notable applications, we establish improved upper bounds to the quantum and private capacities for fundamental quantum channels of interest in quantum information, some of which are also the sources of noise in superconducting quantum computing. In particular, our upper bounds on the quantum capacities of the depolarizing channel and the generalized amplitude damping channel are strictly better than previously best-known bounds for certain regimes.
Quantum channel capacity is a fundamental quantity in order to understand how well quantum information can be transmitted or corrected when subjected to noise. However, it is generally not known how to compute such quantities since the quantum channel coherent information is not additive for all channels, implying that it must be maximized over an unbounded number of channel uses. This leads to the phenomenon known as superadditivity, which refers to the fact that the regularized coherent information of
n channel uses exceeds one-shot coherent information. In this article, we study how the gain in quantum capacity of qudit depolarizing channels relates to the dimension of the considered systems. We make use of an argument based on the no-cloning bound in order to prove that the possible superadditive effects decrease as a function of the dimension for such family of channels. In addition, we prove that the capacity of the qudit depolarizing channel coincides with the coherent information when $d\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$. We also discuss the private classical capacity and obtain similar results. We conclude that when high-dimensional qudits experiencing depolarizing noise are considered, the coherent information of the channel is not only an achievable rate, but essentially the maximum possible rate for any quantum block code.
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
p, that vanish as
p→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.