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Quantum communication via noisy channels

Z. Shadman

Published Jan 1, 2011• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Quantum communication is at the heart of the quantum information theory. We study two types of quantum communication protocols over noisy transmission channels, i.e. super dense coding and cryptography protocols. In the first part of this thesis, for various scenarios, it is discussed how the super dense coding capacity is influenced by noisy quantum channels. The case of memoryless channels as well as those channels with memory which are modelled by uncorrelated and correlated noise, respectively, are considered. Explicitly Pauli channels over arbitrary dimensions are treated and the super dense coding capacity for some resource states is derived. For the qubit depolarizing channel, when noise is uncorrelated, the super dense coding capacity with respect to the input state is also optimized. This illustrates a threshold value of the noise parameter below which the super dense coding capacity is optimized by a maximally entangled initial state, while above the threshold value the super dense coding capacity is optimized by a product state. For Pauli channels, with correlated noise, the case of non unitary encoding is studied and the super dense coding capacity is derived. The first part of this thesis is concluded with an example for multipartite super dense coding. In the second part of the thesis, the problem of optimal eavesdropping on noisy states in quantum key distribution is investigated. The case of the six state protocol, when the signal states are mixed with white noise, is considered. This situation may arise either when Alice deliberately adds noise to the signal states before they leave her lab, or, in a realistic scenario when the eavesdropper (referred to as Eve) is not assumed to replace the noisy quantum channel by a noiseless one. For individual attacks, we find Eve's optimal mutual information with Alice as a function of the quantum bit error rate. Finally, the results illustrate that adding noise on the quantum level can make quantum key distribution more robust against eavesdropping.

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Quantum communication is at the heart of the quantum information theory. We study two types of quantum communication protocols over noisy transmission channels, i.e. super dense coding and cryptography protocols. In the first part of this thesis, for various scenarios, it is discussed how the super dense coding capacity is influenced by noisy quantum channels. The case of memoryless channels as well as those channels with memory which are modelled by uncorrelated and correlated noise, respectively, are considered. Explicitly Pauli channels over arbitrary dimensions are treated and the super dense coding capacity for some resource states is derived. For the qubit depolarizing channel, when noise is uncorrelated, the super dense coding capacity with respect to the input state is also optimized. This illustrates a threshold value of the noise parameter below which the super dense coding capacity is optimized by a maximally entangled initial state, while above the threshold value the super dense coding capacity is optimized by a product state. For Pauli channels, with correlated noise, the case of non unitary encoding is studied and the super dense coding capacity is derived. The first part of this thesis is concluded with an example for multipartite super dense coding.
In the second part of the thesis, the problem of optimal eavesdropping on noisy states in quantum key distribution is investigated. The case of the six state protocol, when the signal states are mixed with white noise, is considered. This situation may arise either when Alice deliberately adds noise to the signal states before they leave her lab, or, in a realistic scenario when the eavesdropper (referred to as Eve) is not assumed to replace the noisy quantum channel by a noiseless one. For individual attacks, we find Eve's optimal mutual information with Alice as a function of the quantum bit error rate. Finally, the results illustrate that adding noise on the quantum level can make quantum key distribution more robust against eavesdropping.
We investigate super dense coding in the presence of noise, i.e. the subsystems of the entangled resource state have to pass a noisy unital quantum channel between the sender and the receiver. We discuss explicitly the case of Pauli channels in an arbitrary dimension and derive the super dense coding capacity (i.e. the optimal information transfer) for some given resource states. For the qubit depolarizing channel, we also optimize the super dense coding capacity with respect to the input state. We show that, below a threshold value of the noise parameter, the super dense coding protocol is optimized by a maximally entangled initial state, while above the threshold it is optimized by a product state. Finally, we provide an example of a noisy channel where non-unitary pre-processing increases the super dense coding capacity, as compared to only unitary encoding.
This chapter demonstrates the power of both coherent communication from Chapter 7 and the particular protocol for entanglement-assisted classical coding from the previous chapter. Recall that coherent dense coding is a version of the dense coding protocol in which the sender and receiver perform all of its steps coherently.1 Since our protocol for entanglement-assisted classical coding from the previous chapter is really just a glorified dense coding protocol, the sender and receiver can perform each of its steps coherently, generating a protocol for entanglement-assisted coherent coding. Then, by exploiting the fact that two coherent bits are equivalent to a qubit and an ebit, we obtain a protocol for entanglement-assisted quantum coding that consumes far less entanglement than a naive strategy would in order to accomplish this task. We next combine this entanglement-assisted quantum coding protocol with entanglement distribution (Section 6.2.1) and obtain a protocol for quantum communication at a rate equal to the channel's coherent information (Section 13.5). This sequence of steps demonstrates an alternate proof of the direct part of the quantum capacity theorem stated in Chapter 24. Entanglement-assisted classical communication is one generalization of superdense coding, in which the noiseless qubit channel becomes an arbitrary noisy quantum channel while the noiseless ebits remain noiseless. Another generalization of super-dense coding is a protocol named noisy super-dense coding , in which the shared entanglement becomes a shared noisy state ρ AB and the noiseless qubit channels remain noiseless. Interestingly, the protocol that we employ in this chapter for noisy super-dense coding is essentially equivalent to the protocol from the previous chapter for entanglement-assisted classical communication, with some slight modifications to account for the different setting. We can also construct a coherent version of noisy super-dense coding, leading to a protocol that we name coherent state transfer . Coherent state transfer accomplishes not only the task of generating coherent communication between Alice and Bob, but it also allows Alice to transfer her share of the state ρ AB to Bob.
We study eavesdropping in quantum key distribution with the six state protocol, when the signal states are mixed with white noise. This situation may arise either when Alice deliberately adds noise to the signal states before they leave her lab, or in a realistic scenario where Eve cannot replace the noisy quantum channel by a noiseless one. We find Eve's optimal mutual information with Alice, for individual attacks, as a function of the qubit error rate. Our result is that added quantum noise reduces Eve's mutual information more than Bob's.
We consider the fundamental protocol of dense coding of classical information assuming that noise affects both the forward and backward communication lines between Alice and Bob. Assuming that this noise is described by the same quantum channel, we define its dense coding capacity by optimizing over all adaptive strategies that Alice can implement, while Bob encodes the information by means of Pauli operators. Exploiting techniques of channel simulation and protocol stretching, we are able to establish the dense coding capacity of Pauli channels in arbitrary finite dimension, with simple formulas for depolarizing and dephasing qubit channels.
We introduce noise-adaptive quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols, in which the honest parties optimize the encoding (state preparation) and decoding (measurement basis) operations according to the noise models affecting the honest subsystems induced by an eavesdropper. This extends conventional QKD schemes that employ fixed encoding and decoding strategies independent of the noise characteristics of the communication channel. We investigate three representative protocols: entanglement-based secure dense coding (SDC), the entanglement-free Lucamarini and Mancini (LM05), and a two-way prepare-and-measure Bennett Brassard (BB84) protocols. Using entropic uncertainty relations, we derive the corresponding secret key rates for both adaptive and conventional non-adaptive scenarios under collective attacks. For independent but identical noise acting on the forward and backward transmission channels, as well as for correlated and non-Markovian environments, we identify classes of channels for which adaptive schemes yield enhanced secret key rates for the considered protocols. In contrast, we also determine Pauli channels, including depolarizing and bit flip channels, for which adaptive strategies provide no benefit. We further show that these optimal sets are generally non-unique and can differ substantially from the unitaries that maximize dense-coding capacity in the absence of security constraints. Our results establish noise-adaptive encoding and decoding as a powerful framework for improving secure communication over realistic noisy quantum channels.