In this thesis, we investigate how protocols in quantum communication theory are influenced by noise. Specifically, we take into account noise during the transmission of quantum information and noise during the processing of quantum information. We describe three novel quantum communication protocols which can be accomplished efficiently in a noisy environment: (1) Factorization of Eve: We show that it is possible to disentangle transmitted qubits a posteriori from the quantum channel's degrees of freedom. (2) Cluster state purification: We give multi-partite entanglement purification protocols for a large class of entangled quantum states. (3) Entanglement purification protocols from quantum codes: We describe a constructive method to create bipartite entanglement purification protocols form quantum error correcting codes, and investigate the properties of these protocols, which can be operated in two different modes, which are related to quantum communication and quantum computation protocols, respectively.
In this thesis, we investigate how protocols in quantum communication theory are influenced by noise. Specifically, we take into account noise during the transmission of quantum information and noise during the processing of quantum information. We describe three novel quantum communication protocols which can be accomplished efficiently in a noisy environment: (1) Factorization of Eve: We show that it is possible to disentangle transmitted qubits a posteriori from the quantum channel's degrees of freedom. (2) Cluster state purification: We give multi-partite entanglement purification protocols for a large class of entangled quantum states. (3) Entanglement purification protocols from quantum codes: We describe a constructive method to create bipartite entanglement purification protocols form quantum error correcting codes, and investigate the properties of these protocols, which can be operated in two different modes, which are related to quantum communication and quantum computation protocols, respectively.
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 study the use of entanglement purification for quantum communication over long distances. For distances much longer than the coherence length of a corresponding noisy quantum channel, the fidelity of transmission is usually so low that standard purification methods are not applicable. It is possible, however, to divide the channel into shorter segments that are purified separately and then connected by the method of entanglement swapping. This method can be much more efficient than schemes based on quantum error correction, as it makes explicit use of two-way classical communication. An important question is how the noise, introduced by imperfect local operations (that constitute the protocols of purification and the entanglement swapping), accumulates in such a compound channel, and how it can be kept below a certain noise level. To treat this problem, we first study the applicability and the efficiency of entanglement purification protocols in the situation of imperfect local operations. We then present a scheme that allows entanglement purification over arbitrary long channels and tolerates errors on the percent level. It requires a polynomial overhead in time, and an overhead in local resources that grows only logarithmically with the length of the channel.
Quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement imbue quantum systems with information processing power in excess of their classical counterparts. These properties of quantum states are, however, highly fragile. As we enter the era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, this vulnerability to noise is a major hurdle to the experimental realisation of quantum technologies. In this thesis we explore the role of noise in quantum information processing from two different perspectives. In Part I we consider noise from the perspective of quantum error correcting codes. Error correcting codes are often analysed with respect to simplified toy models of noise, such as iid depolarising noise. We consider generalising these techniques for analysing codes under more realistic noise models, including features such as biased or correlated errors. We also consider designing customised codes which not only take into account and exploit features of the underlying physical noise. Considering such tailored codes will be of particular importance for NISQ applications in which finite-size effects can be significant. In Part II we apply tools from information theory to study the finite-resource effects which arise in the trade-offs between resource costs and error rates for certain quantum information processing tasks. We start by considering classical communication over quantum channels, providing a refined analysis of the trade-off between communication rate and error in the regime of a finite number of channel uses. We then extend these techniques to the problem of resource interconversion in theories such as quantum entanglement and quantum thermodynamics, studying finite-size effects which arise in resource-error trade-offs. By studying this effect in detail, we also show how detrimental finite-size effects in devices such as thermal engines may be greatly suppressed by carefully engineering the underlying resource interconversion processes.
We give a review on entanglement purification for bipartite and multipartite quantum states, with the main focus on the theoretical work carried out by our group in the last couple of years. We discuss entanglement purification in the context of quantum communication, where we emphasize its close relation to quantum error correction. Various bipartite and multipartite entanglement purification protocols are discussed, and their performance under idealized and realistic conditions is studied. Several applications of entanglement purification in quantum communication and computation are presented, which highlights the fact that entanglement purification is a fundamental tool in quantum information processing.
In order to perform faithfully quantum communication protocols such as quantum teleportation, superdense coding, quantum key distribution, and quantum secret sharing, we need the entanglement purification process to make a maximal entanglement out of many copies of the partially entangled pairs by using local operations and classical communication. In this dissertation,\nwe analyze the efficiency of several entanglement purification protocols for qubit states and qudit states, and present a new efficient entanglement purification protocol. Furthermore, we show that our method can be applied to the existing best protocol\nso as to improve the efficiency.
Entanglement distillation, a fundamental building block of quantum networks, enables the purification of noisy entangled states shared among distant nodes by local operations and classical communication. Its practical realization presents several technical challenges, including the storage of quantum states in quantum memory and the execution of coherent quantum operations on multiple copies of states within the quantum memory. In this work, we present an entanglement purification protocol via quantum communication, namely a carrier-assisted entanglement purification protocol, which utilizes two elements only: i) quantum memory for a single-copy entangled state shared by parties and ii) single qubits travelling between parties. We show that the protocol, when single-qubit transmission is noiseless, can purify a noisy entangled state shared by parties. When single-qubit transmission is noisy, the purification relies on types of noisy qubit channels; we characterize Pauli channels such that the protocol works for the purification. We address this limitation by using multiple carrier qubits, and show that for any non-entanglement-breaking Pauli channel, the protocol's fixed-point fidelity approaches unity as the number of carriers increases. Our results significantly reduce the experimental overhead required for distilling entanglement: the practical advantage is demonstrated through parameters directly related to the capability of entanglement purification, such as noise in quantum memory, local measurements, channel use, and entanglement fidelity. We envisage that the protocol would make long-distance pure entanglement closer to a practical realization.