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Optimal Compression for Ensembles of Identically Prepared Mixed States

Yuxiang Yang, Daniel Ebler, Giulio Chiribella

Published Jun 11, 2015• 1 citation
OpenAlex

Abstract

We present an universal protocol, capable of compressing $N$ copies of a completely unknown mixed state into $O(\log N)$ qubits in a lossless fashion. Our result demonstrates that the exponential compression of identically prepared pure states, recently implemented in a prototype experiment by Rozema et. al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 160504 (2014)], can be extended to arbitrary mixed states, despite the fact that the latter cover an exponentially large space. Furthermore, we highlight a striking difference between the pure and the mixed state case, showing that, if the spectrum is known with sufficient precision, the number of qubits needed for compression of a mixed state will drop down discontinuously as soon as a small recovery error is allowed.

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We present an universal protocol, capable of compressing NNN copies of a completely unknown mixed state into O(log⁡N)O(\log N)O(logN) qubits in a lossless fashion. Our result demonstrates that the exponential compression of identically prepared pure states, recently implemented in a prototype experiment by Rozema et. al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 160504 (2014)], can be extended to arbitrary mixed states, despite the fact that the latter cover an exponentially large space. Furthermore, we highlight a striking difference between the pure and the mixed state case, showing that, if the spectrum is known with sufficient precision, the number of qubits needed for compression of a mixed state will drop down discontinuously as soon as a small recovery error is allowed.
We present one-shot compression protocols that optimally encode ensembles of N identically prepared mixed states into O(logN) qubits. In contrast to the case of pure-state ensembles, we find that the number of encoding qubits drops down discontinuously as soon as a nonzero error is tolerated and the spectrum of the states is known with sufficient precision. For qubit ensembles, this feature leads to a 25% saving of memory space. Our compression protocols can be implemented efficiently on a quantum computer.
We consider the problem of compression of the quantum information carried by ensemble of mixed states. We prove that for arbitrary coding schemes the least number of quantum bits (qubits) per message needed to convey the signal states asymptotically faithfully is bounded from below by the Holevo function $S(\ensuremath{\varrho})\ensuremath{-}{\ensuremath{\sum}}_{i}{p}_{i}S({\ensuremath{\varrho}}_{i})$. We also show that a compression protocol can be composed with another one, provided that the latter offers perfect transmission. Such a compound protocol is applied to the case of binary source. It is conjectured to reach the obtained bound. Finally, we point out that in the case of mixed signal states there could be a difference between the maximal compression rates at the coding schemes that are ``blind'' to the signal and the ones that assume the knowledge about the identities of the signal states.
We establish exponential strong converse theorems for blind quantum data compression of finite-dimensional mixed-state sources, with and without entanglement assistance. Blind compression is a fundamental quantum information processing task in which the sender aims to transmit quantum states without direct access to the classical label. Strong converse is a notable aspect of data compression: the accuracy of the compression abruptly drops down to zero once the compression rate goes below a threshold. Strong converses for data compression have been established for pure-state sources; however, for mixed-state sources, the optimal compression rate is determined by a structural decomposition of quantum states and can change substantially under small perturbations. This sensitivity makes it difficult to quantitatively analyze the trade-off between compression rate and error. Despite recent progress, whether a strong converse holds at the optimal rate has remained unresolved in general. In this work, we resolve this question affirmatively. For unassisted compression, we show that at every rate below the optimum, the accuracy decays exponentially with the block length for general mixed-state sources without restrictions on protocols. We also prove exponential strong converse for blind compression with unlimited entanglement assistance at its optimal rate. Combining the two strong converse bounds yields exponential decay at every compression-entanglement rate pair outside the complete achievable rate region. Our proof introduces a new overlap quantity based on the structure of quantum states; this quantity connects preservation of the source information to the dimension of the transmitted system. We expect that this approach provides useful tools for converse analyses of other quantum information-processing tasks involving mixed states.
Identical preparation creates permutation symmetry that can be used for lossless quantum compression. For nnn copies of an unknown ddd-dimensional pure state, the tensor-power input lies in the fully symmetric subspace, whose dimension is polynomial in nnn for fixed local dimension. Schur--Weyl duality isolates this subspace coherently, allowing the fixed representation labels to be discarded while retaining all information needed for recovery. The resulting encoder and decoder are exact on the input family. Because tensor-power states span the symmetric subspace, the achieved memory dimension is also necessary for reversible coherent compression, so the scheme is space-optimal. The encoder is implemented recursively with Clebsch--Gordan transforms, and only the branches reached by symmetric inputs need to be reproduced. Standard efficient synthesis of these transforms yields polynomial-size circuits for fixed local dimension and arbitrary target accuracy. Thus identically prepared pure states in arbitrary dimension admit lossless, space-optimal compression with an efficient circuit implementation.
We obtain the optimal scheme for estimating unknown qubit mixed states when an arbitrary number NNN of identically prepared copies is available. We discuss the case of states in the whole Bloch sphere as well as the restricted situation where these states are known to lie on the equatorial plane. For the former case we obtain that the optimal measurement does not depend on the prior probability distribution provided it is isotropic. Although the equatorial-plane case does not have this property for arbitrary NNN, we give a prior-independent scheme which becomes optimal in the asymptotic limit of large NNN. We compute the maximum mean fidelity in this asymptotic regime for the two cases. We show that within the pointwise estimation approach these limits can be obtained in a rather easy and rapid way. This derivation is based on heuristic arguments that are made rigorous by using van Trees inequalities. The interrelation between the estimation of the purity and the direction of the state is also discussed. In the general case we show that they correspond to independent estimations whereas for the equatorial-plane states this is only true asymptotically.
Two-Ievel (qubit) clock systems are often used to perform precise measurement of time. In this work, we propose a compression protocol for n identically prepared states of qubit clocks. The protocol faithfully encodes the states into (1/2) logn qubits and (1/2) logn classical bits and works even in the presence of noise. If the purity of the clock states is fixed, (1/2) logn qubits are sufficient. We also prove that this protocol requires the minimum amount of total memory among all protocols with vanishing error in the large n limit.