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IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)

Second order refinements for the classical capacity of quantum channels with separable input states

Marco Tomamichel, Vincent Y. F. Tan

Published Jun 1, 2014• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We study the non-asymptotic fundamental limits for transmitting classical information over memoryless quantum channels, i.e. we investigate the amount of information that can be transmitted when the channel is used a finite number of times and a finite average decoding error is permissible. We show that, if we restrict the encoder to use ensembles of separable states, the non-asymptotic fundamental limit admits a Gaussian approximation that illustrates the speed at which the rate of optimal codes converges to the Holevo capacity as the number of channel uses tends to infinity. To do so, several important properties of quantum information quantities, such as the capacity-achieving output state, the divergence radius, and the channel dispersion, are generalized from their classical counterparts. Further, we exploit a close relation between classical-quantum channel coding and quantum binary hypothesis testing and rely on recent progress in the non-asymptotic characterization of quantum hypothesis testing and its Gaussian approximation.

DOI
10.1109/isit.2014.6874811

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We study the non-asymptotic fundamental limits for transmitting classical information over memoryless quantum channels, i.e. we investigate the amount of information that can be transmitted when the channel is used a finite number of times and a finite average decoding error is permissible. We show that, if we restrict the encoder to use ensembles of separable states, the non-asymptotic fundamental limit admits a Gaussian approximation that illustrates the speed at which the rate of optimal codes converges to the Holevo capacity as the number of channel uses tends to infinity. To do so, several important properties of quantum information quantities, such as the capacity-achieving output state, the divergence radius, and the channel dispersion, are generalized from their classical counterparts. Further, we exploit a close relation between classical-quantum channel coding and quantum binary hypothesis testing and rely on recent progress in the non-asymptotic characterization of quantum hypothesis testing and its Gaussian approximation.
We use the smooth entropy approach to treat the problems of binary quantum hypothesis testing and the transmission of classical information through a quantum channel. We provide lower and upper bounds on the optimal type II error of quantum hypothesis testing in terms of the smooth max-relative entropy of the two states representing the two hypotheses. Then using a relative entropy version of the quantum asymptotic equipartition property (QAEP), we can recover the strong converse rate of the i.i.d. hypothesis testing problem in the asymptotics. On the other hand, combining Stein's lemma with our bounds, we obtain a stronger ( ε-independent) version of the relative entropy-QAEP. Similarly, we provide bounds on the one-shot ε-error classical capacity of a quantum channel in terms of a smooth max-relative entropy variant of its Holevo capacity. Using these bounds and the ε-independent version of the relative entropy-QAEP, we can recover both the Holevo- Schumacher- Westmoreland theorem about the optimal direct rate of a memoryless quantum channel with product state encoding, as well as its strong converse counterpart.
The quantum capacity of a memoryless channel determines the maximal rate at which we can communicate reliably over asymptotically many uses of the channel. Here we illustrate that this asymptotic characterization is insufficient in practical scenarios where decoherence severely limits our ability to manipulate large quantum systems in the encoder and decoder. In practical settings, we should instead focus on the optimal trade-off between three parameters: the rate of the code, the size of the quantum devices at the encoder and decoder, and the fidelity of the transmission. We find approximate and exact characterizations of this trade-off for various channels of interest, including dephasing, depolarizing and erasure channels. In each case, the trade-off is parameterized by the capacity and a second channel parameter, the quantum channel dispersion. In the process, we develop several bounds that are valid for general quantum channels and can be computed for small instances.
The classical capacity of a noisy optical channel is the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted reliably, given a constraint on the mean input energy. For the ubiquitous bosonic Gaussian channels, which include standard models of loss and noise in fibre and free-space optical links, determining this rate requires addressing whether entanglement between channel uses or non-Gaussian signals can outperform Gaussian encodings. More precisely, the question is whether the energy-constrained Holevo information is additive across arbitrarily many channel uses and coincides with its Gaussian counterpart. We answer these fundamental questions in the affirmative for every single-mode bosonic Gaussian channel at every input energy. Namely, we prove that independently prepared Gaussian states with Gaussian-distributed random displacements achieve the capacity, including in the low-energy regime where squeezing the signals competes with encoding information in their displacement. Our proof connects an entanglement inequality to a sharp, additive lower bound on output entropy. We then characterise communication above capacity: under a strict total photon-number cutoff, the probability of correct decoding decreases exponentially with the number of channel uses, and we derive explicit bounds on the decay exponent. When only the mean photon number is constrained, a simple energy-rescaling formula determines exactly the entire asymptotic rate--error trade-off: the capacity at mean photon number NNN and allowed average decoding error εεε equals the vanishing-error capacity at mean photon number N/(1−ε)N/(1-ε)N/(1−ε). Together, these results identify the ultimate limits of classical communication for some of the most fundamental models of optical communication.
We derive upper bounds on the rate of transmission of classical information over quantum channels by block codes with a given blocklength and error probability, for both entanglement-assisted and unassisted codes, in terms of a unifying framework of quantum hypothesis testing with restricted measurements. Our bounds do not depend on any special property of the channel (such as memorylessness) and generalize both a classical converse of Polyanskiy, Poor, and Verdú as well as a quantum converse of Renner and Wang, and have a number of desirable properties. In particular, our bound on entanglement-assisted codes is a semidefinite program and for memoryless channels, its large blocklength limit is the well-known formula for entanglement-assisted capacity due to Bennett, Shor, Smolin, and Thapliyal.
We obtain lower and upper bounds on the one-shot strong converse capacity for the transmission of classical information through quantum channels, in terms of a generalized relative entropy quantity, namely, the smoothed max-relative entropy. For the case of a memoryless channel, these bounds converge independently to the Holevo capacity, in the limit of asymptotically many uses. We also employ our one-shot result to obtain an upper bound to the strong converse capacity of a channel with long-term memory which can be shown to violate the strong converse property. Finally, we show bounds on the strong converse rate of hypothesis testing in the one-shot scenario, again in terms of the smoothed max-relative entropies.
The capacity of a classical-quantum channel (or, in other words, the classical capacity of a quantum channel) is considered in the most general setting, where no structural assumptions such as the stationary memoryless property are made on a channel. A capacity formula as well as a characterization of the strong converse property is given just in parallel with the corresponding classical results of Verdu-Han (1994) which are based on the so-called information-spectrum method. The general results are applied to the stationary memoryless case with or without cost constraint on inputs, whereby a deep relation between the channel coding theory and the hypothesis testing for two quantum states is elucidated.