Polarization coding of quantum information

Joseph M. Renes, Frédéric Dupuis, Renato Renner

Polar coding, introduced 2008 by Arıkan, is the first (very) efficiently encodable and decodable coding scheme whose information transmission rate provably achieves the Shannon bound for classical discrete memoryless channels in the asymptotic limit of large block sizes. Here, we study the use of polar codes for the transmission of quantum information. Focusing on the case of qubit Pauli channels and qubit erasure channels, we use classical polar codes to construct a coding scheme that asymptotically achieves a net transmission rate equal to the coherent information using efficient encoding and decoding operations and code construction. Our codes generally require preshared entanglement between sender and receiver, but for channels with a sufficiently low noise level we demonstrate that the rate of preshared entanglement required is zero.

Peter P. Rohde

Christoph Hirche

Polar codes are the first capacity achieving and efficiently implementable codes for classical communication. Recently they have also been generalized to communication over classical-quantum and quantum channels. In this work we present our recent results for polar coding in quantum information theory, including applications to classical-quantum multiple access channels, interference channels and compound communication settings, including the first proof of channel coding achieving the Han-Kobayashi rate region of the interference channel without the need of a simultaneous decoder. Moreover we add to the existing framework by extending polar codes to achieve the asymmetric capacity and improving the block error probability for classical-quantum channels. In addition we use polar codes to prove a new achievable rate region for the classical-quantum broadcast channel. We also discuss polar codes for quantum communication over quantum channels and state results towards codes for compound quantum channels in this setting. We conclude by stating a list of interesting open questions to invite further research on the topic.

Richard Jozsa

François Chapeau‐Blondeau

Joseph M. Renes, Renato Renner

Polar coding, introduced 2008 by Arikan, is the first efficiently encodable and decodable coding scheme that provably achieves the Shannon bound for the rate of information transmission over classical discrete memoryless channels (in the asymptotic limit of large block sizes). Here we study the use of polar codes for the efficient coding and decoding of quantum information. Focusing on the case of qubit channels we construct a coding scheme which, using some pre-shared entangle- ment, asymptotically achieves a net transmission rate equal to the coherent information. Further- more, for channels with sufficiently low noise level, no pre-shared entanglement is required.