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IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)

Sphere packing bound for quantum channels

Marco Dalai

Published Jul 1, 2012• 11 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this paper, the Sphere-Packing-Bound of Fano, Shannon, Gallager and Berlekamp is extended to general classical-quantum channels. The obtained upper bound for the reliability function, for the case of pure-state channels, coincides at high rates with a lower bound derived by Burnashev and Holevo [1]. Thus, for pure state channels, the reliability function at high rates is now exactly determined. For the general case, the obtained upper bound expression at high rates was conjectured to represent also a lower bound to the reliability function, but a complete proof has not been obtained yet.

DOI
10.1109/isit.2012.6283547

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In this paper, the Sphere-Packing-Bound of Fano, Shannon, Gallager and Berlekamp is extended to general classical-quantum channels. The obtained upper bound for the reliability function, for the case of pure-state channels, coincides at high rates with a lower bound derived by Burnashev and Holevo [1]. Thus, for pure state channels, the reliability function at high rates is now exactly determined. For the general case, the obtained upper bound expression at high rates was conjectured to represent also a lower bound to the reliability function, but a complete proof has not been obtained yet.
In this paper, the sphere packing bound of Fano, Shannon, Gal- lager and Berlekamp and the zero-rate bound of Berlekamp are extended to general classical-quantum channels. The upper bound for the reliability func- tion obtained from the sphere packing coincides at high rates, for the case of pure state channels, with a lower bound derived by Burnashev and Holevo (21). Thus, for pure state channels, the reliability function at high rates is now ex- actly determined. For the general case, the obtained upper bound expression at high rates was conjectured to represent also a lower bound to the reliability function, but a complete proof has not been obtained yet. Finally, the obtained zero-rate upper bound to the reliability function of a general classical-quantum channel with no zero-error capacity coincides with a lower bound obtained by Holevo, thus determining the exact expression.
The sphere packing bound, in the form given by Shannon, Gallager, and Berlekamp, was recently extended to classical-quantum channels, and it was shown that this creates a natural setting for combining probabilistic approaches with some combinatorial ones such as the Lovász theta function. In this paper, we extend the study to the case of constant-composition codes. We first extend the sphere packing bound for classical-quantum channels to this case, and we then show that the obtained result is related to a variation of the Lovász theta function studied by Marton. We then propose a further extension to the case of varying channels and codewords with a constant conditional composition given a particular sequence. This extension is finally applied to auxiliary channels to deduce a bound, which is useful in the low rate region and which can be interpreted as an extension of the Elias bound.
A fundamental quantity of interest in Shannon theory, classical or quantum, is the error exponent of a given channel W and rate R: the constantE(W,R)E(W,R)E(W,R)which governs the exponential decay of decoding error when using ever larger optimal codes of fixed rate R to communicate over ever more (memoryless) instances of a given channel W. Nearly matching lower and upper bounds are well-known for classical channels. Here I show a lower bound on the error exponent of communication over arbitrary classical-quantum (CQ) channels which matches Dalai’s sphere-packing upper bound for rates above a critical value, exactly analogous to the case of classical channels. This proves a conjecture made by Holevo in his investigation of the problem. Unlike the classical case, however, the argument does not proceed via a refined analysis of a suitable decoder, but instead by leveraging a bound by Hayashi on the error exponent of the cryptographic task of privacy amplification. This bound is then related to the coding problem via tight entropic uncertainty relations and Gallager’s method of constructing capacity-achieving parity-check codes for arbitrary channels. Along the way, I find a lower bound on the error exponent of the task of compression of classical information relative to quantum side information that matches the sphere-packing upper bound of Cheng et al. In turn, the polynomial prefactors to the sphere-packing bound found by Cheng et al. may be translated to the privacy amplification problem, sharpening a recent result by Li, Yao, and Hayashi, at least for linear randomness extractors.
We study the reliability function of general classical-quantum channels, which describes the optimal exponent of the decay of decoding error when the communication rate is below the capacity. As the main result, we prove a lower bound, in terms of the quantum Rényi information in Petz's form, for the reliability function. This resolves Holevo's conjecture proposed in 2000, a long-standing open problem in quantum information theory. It turns out that the obtained lower bound matches the upper bound derived by Dalai in 2013, when the communication rate is above a critical value. Thus, we have determined the reliability function in this high-rate case. Our approach relies on Renes' breakthrough made in 2022, which relates classical-quantum channel coding to that of privacy amplification, as well as our new characterization of the channel Rényi information.
We study lower bounds on the optimal error probability in channel coding at rates below capacity, commonly termed sphere-packing bounds. In this work, we establish a sphere-packing bound for classical-quantum channels, which significantly improves previous prefactor from the order of subexponential to polynomial. Furthermore, the gap between the obtained error exponent for constant composition codes and the best known classical random coding exponent vanishes in the order of o(log n/n), indicating our sphere-packing bound is almost exact in the high rate regime. The main technical contributions are two converse Hoeffding bounds for quantum hypothesis testing and the saddle-point properties of error exponent functions.
The aim of this work is to study the zero-error capacity of pure-state classical-quantum channels in the setting of list decoding. We provide an achievability bound for list-size two and a converse bound holding for every fixed list size. The two bounds coincide for channels whose pairwise absolute state overlaps form a positive semi-definite matrix. Finally, we discuss a remarkable peculiarity of the classical-quantum case: differently from the fully classical setting, the rate at which the sphere-packing bound diverges might not be achievable by zero-error list codes, even when we take the limit of fixed but arbitrarily large list size.