A natural question in characterizing the information theoretic power of quantum channels is to ask at what rate entanglement is needed in order to asymptotically simulate a quantum channel in the presence of free classical communication. We call this the entanglement cost of a channel, and prove a formula describing it for all channels. We discuss two applications. Firstly, we are able to link the security in the noisy-storage model to a problem of sending quantum rather than classical information through the adversary's storage device. This not only greatly improves the range of parameters where security could be shown previously, but allows us to prove security for storage devices for which no non-trivial statements were known before. Secondly, our result has consequences for the study of the strong converse quantum capacity. Here, we show that any coding scheme that sends quantum information through a quantum channel at a rate larger than the entanglement cost of the channel has an exponentially small fidelity.
The entanglement cost of a quantum channel is the minimal rate at which entanglement (between sender and receiver) is needed in order to simulate many copies of a quantum channel in the presence of free classical communication. In this paper, we show how to express this quantity as a regularized optimization of the entanglement formation over states that can be generated between sender and receiver. Our formula is the channel analog of a well-known formula for the entanglement cost of quantum states in terms of the entanglement of formation and shares a similar relation to the recently shattered hope for additivity. The entanglement cost of a quantum channel can be seen as the analog of the quantum reverse Shannon theorem in the case where free classical communication is allowed. The techniques used in the proof of our result are then also inspired by a recent proof of the quantum reverse Shannon theorem and feature the one-shot formalism for quantum information theory, the postselection technique for quantum channels as well as Sion's minimax theorem. We discuss two applications of our result. First, we are able to link the security in the noisy-storage model to a problem of sending quantum rather than classical information through the adversary's storage device. This not only improves the range of parameters where security can be shown, but also allows us to prove security for storage devices for which no results were known before. Second, our result has consequences for the study of the strong converse quantum capacity. Here, we show that any coding scheme that sends quantum information through a quantum channel at a rate larger than the entanglement cost of the channel has an exponentially small fidelity.
A fully general strong converse for channel coding states that when the rate of sending classical information exceeds the capacity of a quantum channel, the probability of correctly decoding goes to zero exponentially in the number of channel uses, even when we allow code states which are entangled across several uses of the channel. Such a statement was previously only known for classical channels and the quantum identity channel. By relating the problem to the additivity of minimum output entropies, we show that a strong converse holds for a large class of channels, including all unital qubit channels, the d-dimensional depolarizing channel and the Werner-Holevo channel. This further justifies the interpretation of the classical capacity as a sharp threshold for information transmission.
We study the problem of simulating protocols in a quantum communication setting over noisy channels. This problem falls at the intersection of quantum information theory and quantum communication complexity, and it will be of importance for eventual real-world applications of interactive quantum protocols, which can be proved to have exponentially lower communication costs than their classical counterparts for some problems. These are the first results concerning the quantum version of this problem, originally studied by Schulman in a classical setting [L. J. Schulman, Communication on noisy channels: A coding theorem for computation, in Proceedings of the 33rd Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, IEEE, 1992, pp. 724--733], [L. J. Schulman, Deterministic coding for interactive communication, in Proceedings of the 25th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, ACM, 1993, pp. 747--756]. We simulate a length
N quantum communication protocol by a length
O(N) protocol with arbitrarily small error. Under adversarial noise, our strategy can withstand, for arbitrarily small
ε>0, error rates as high as
1/2−ε when parties preshare perfect entanglement, but the classical channel is noisy. We show that this is optimal. We provide extension of these results in several other models of communication, including when also the entanglement is noisy, and when there is no preshared entanglement but communication is quantum and noisy. We also study the case of random noise, for which we provide simulation protocols with positive communication rates and no preshared entanglement over some quantum channels with quantum capacity
CQ=0, proving that
CQ is in general not the right characterization of a channel's capacity for interactive quantum communication. Our results are stated for a general quantum communication protocol in which Alice and Bob collaborate, and these results hold in particular in the quantum communication complexity settings of the Yao and Cleve--Buhrman models.
We revisit a fundamental open problem in quantum information theory, namely whether it is possible to transmit quantum information at a rate exceeding the channel capacity if we allow for a non-vanishing probability of decoding error. Here we establish that the Rains information of any quantum channel is a strong converse rate for quantum communication: For any code with a rate exceeding the Rains information of the channel, we show that the fidelity vanishes exponentially fast as the number of channel uses increases. This remains true even if we consider codes that perform classical post-processing on the transmitted quantum data. Our result has several applications. Most importantly, for generalized dephasing channels we show that the Rains information is also achievable, and thereby establish the strong converse property for quantum communication over such channels. This for the first time conclusively settles the strong converse question for a class of quantum channels that have a non-trivial quantum capacity.
We revisit a fundamental open problem in quantum information theory, namely, whether it is possible to transmit quantum information at a rate exceeding the channel capacity if we allow for a non-vanishing probability of decoding error. Here, we establish that the Rains information of any quantum channel is a strong converse rate for quantum communication. For any sequence of codes with rate exceeding the Rains information of the channel, we show that the fidelity vanishes exponentially fast as the number of channel uses increases. This remains true even if we consider codes that perform classical postprocessing on the transmitted quantum data. As an application of this result, for generalized dephasing channels, we show that the Rains information is also achievable, and thereby establish the strong converse property for quantum communication over such channels. Thus, we conclusively settle the strong converse question for a class of quantum channels that have a non-trivial quantum capacity.
The entanglement-assisted capacity of a quantum channel is known to provide the formal quantum generalization of Shannon's classical channel capacity theorem, in the sense that it admits a single-letter characterization in terms of the quantum mutual information and does not increase in the presence of a noiseless quantum feedback channel from receiver to sender. In this work, we investigate second-order asymptotics of the entanglement-assisted communication task. That is, we consider how quickly the rates of entanglement-assisted codes converge to the entanglement-assisted capacity of a channel as a function of the number of channel uses and the error tolerance. We define a quantum generalization of the mutual information variance of a channel in the entanglement-assisted setting. For covariant channels, we show that this quantity is equal to the channel dispersion, and characterizes the convergence towards the entanglement-assisted capacity when the number of channel uses increases. More generally, we prove that the Gaussian approximation for a second-order coding rate is achievable for all quantum channels.