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Parameter Regime Giving Zero Quantum Coherent Information of A Non-Pauli Quantum Channel

Tong Liu

Published Dec 1, 2015• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

In quantum information theory, in order for two (or more) parties to communicate, there must be a communication channel. The two central quantities that must be considered are quantum channel capacity and the quantum coherent information. The first describes the capability for a given channel to communicate the required quantum information and the latter describes the amount of information that has been successfully transmitted through the corresponding quantum channel. The capacity of a quantum channel is actually a function of the coherent information, and so the basic step for getting the channel capacity is to calculate its coherent information which serves as a lower bound on the capacity. Generally speaking, it is hard to find the capacity of a given quantum channel, this is because of regularization which is to introduce additional process to solve an ill-conditioned problem. Comparing to general quantum channels, the capacity is easily achieved for the two fundamental classes of quantum channels, degradable and antidegradable, in such a way that degradable channels have capacity given exactly by the coherent information and antidegradable channels have zero coherent information. However, this is not true for general quantum channels, by all means that, under certain restrictions, it is possible to find a non-Pauli quantum channel such that its coherent information is zero but its capacity is non-zero.

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In quantum information theory, in order for two (or more) parties to communicate, there must be a communication channel. The two central quantities that must be considered are quantum channel capacity and the quantum coherent information. The first describes the capability for a given channel to communicate the required quantum information and the latter describes the amount of information that has been successfully transmitted through the corresponding quantum channel. The capacity of a quantum channel is actually a function of the coherent information, and so the basic step for getting the channel capacity is to calculate its coherent information which serves as a lower bound on the capacity. Generally speaking, it is hard to find the capacity of a given quantum channel, this is because of regularization which is to introduce additional process to solve an ill-conditioned problem. Comparing to general quantum channels, the capacity is easily achieved for the two fundamental classes of quantum channels, degradable and antidegradable, in such a way that degradable channels have capacity given exactly by the coherent information and antidegradable channels have zero coherent information. However, this is not true for general quantum channels, by all means that, under certain restrictions, it is possible to find a non-Pauli quantum channel such that its coherent information is zero but its capacity is non-zero.
Quantum channel capacities give the fundamental performance limits for information flow over a communication channel. However, the prevalence of superadditivity is a major obstacle to understanding capacities, both quantitatively and conceptually. In contrast, examples exhibiting additivity, though relatively rare, offer crucial insights into the origins of nonadditivity and form the basis of our strongest upper bounds on capacity. Degradable channels, whose coherent information is provably additive, stand out as among the few classes of channels for which the quantum capacity is exactly computable. In this paper, we introduce two families of non-degradable channels whose coherent information remains additive, making their quantum capacities tractable. First, we demonstrate that channels capable of “outperforming” their environment, under conditions weaker than degradability, can exhibit either strong or weak additivity of coherent information. Second, we explore a complementary construction that modifies a channel to preserve coherent information additivity while destroying the “outperforming” property. We analyze how structural constraints guarantee strong and weak additivity and investigate how relaxing these constraints leads to the failure of strong additivity, with weak additivity potentially persisting.
The quantum capacity of a noisy channel quantifies the maximum rate at which quantum information can be transmitted reliably. For general channels, its evaluation requires an optimization over arbitrarily many channel uses. Degradable channels form a central exception: their capacity is given by the single-letter coherent information, while antidegradable channels have zero capacity. Nevertheless, even for these fundamental classes, it has remained open whether communication above capacity becomes possible when a fixed non-maximal error is tolerated. Here we resolve this problem by proving an exponential strong converse for every finite-dimensional degradable and antidegradable channel: at any rate above capacity, the fidelity of every coding scheme decays exponentially with the number of channel uses. As an immediate consequence, we establish the first all-code exponential strong converse for the quantum erasure channel throughout its full parameter range, strengthening previous results that applied only to almost all codes. We also show that exponential strong-converse bounds are preserved under receiver post-processing. This yields efficiently computable semidefinite-programming bounds for arbitrary finite-dimensional channels, improved bounds for Pauli channels, and an exact exponential strong converse for a nondegradable multilevel amplitude-damping family.
Quantum channel capacities give the fundamental performance limits for information flow over a communication channel. However, the prevalence of superadditivity is a major obstacle to understanding capacities, both quantitatively and conceptually. Examples of additivity, while rare, provide key insight into the origins of nonadditivity and enable our best upper bounds on capacities. Degradable channels, which have additive coherent information, are some of the only channels for which we can calculate the quantum capacity. In this paper, we introduce two families of non-degradable channels whose coherent information remains additive, making their quantum capacities tractable. First, we demonstrate that channels capable of “outperforming” their environment, under conditions weaker than degradability, can exhibit either strong or weak additivity of coherent information. Second, we explore a complementary construction that modifies a channel to preserve coherent information additivity while destroying the “outperforming” property. We analyze how structural constraints guarantee strong and weak additivity and investigate how relaxing these constraints leads to the failure of strong additivity, with weak additivity potentially persisting.
A channel capacity quantifies the communication capability of a noisy physical process. In contrast to communication channels in the classical world, quantum theory makes this capability contextual. We show that two Pauli two-qubit channels, each with zero private classical capacity, can be used to transmit private information when used together. One is a two-qubit Pauli channel whose environment can reconstruct the receiver output up to matrix transposition; the other is an antidegradable channel. We obtain a similar result when the second channel is the 50% qubit erasure channel. A simple binary code built from rank-three mixtures of Bell states activates private communication. The main ingredient in our construction is a transpose-antidegradable channel that is not antidegradable.
Transmitting data reliably over noisy communication channels is one of the most important applications of information theory, and is well understood for channels modelled by classical physics. However, when quantum effects are involved, we do not know how to compute channel capacities. This is because the formula for the quantum capacity involves maximizing the coherent information over an unbounded number of channel uses. In fact, entanglement across channel uses can even increase the coherent information from zero to non-zero. Here we study the number of channel uses necessary to detect positive coherent information. In all previous known examples, two channel uses already sufficed. It might be that only a finite number of channel uses is always sufficient. We show that this is not the case: for any number of uses, there are channels for which the coherent information is zero, but which nonetheless have capacity. The transmission of quantum information through channels is a fundamental step for future quantum communication technologies. Cubitt et al.now show that there exist channels whose potential for transmitting quantum information requires an unbounded number of usages to be detected.
The quantum capacity captures the value of a quantum channel for transmitting quantum information, establishing the fundamental limits on quantum communication. In spite of its central role in quantum information theory, the quantum capacity of most channels is unknown, with wide gaps between the best upper and lower bounds. Even deciding whether a channel has nonzero capacity -- finding its capacity threshold -- is difficult. In this paper we report significant increases in the capacity thresholds of two prototypical noise models: the depolarizing channel and Pauli channels. In the case of the depolarizing channel, this is the first improvement in 18 years, giving a bigger increase beyond the hashing bound than all previous improvements combined. Our starting point is the representation theoretic framework recently proposed by Bhalerao and Leditzky (2025) to compute coherent information for special permutation invariant states. We generalize their framework to the full symmetric subspace, which allow us to optimize coherent information over rank two states in that space. A representation theoretic calculation shows that exponentially many Kraus operators of the channel annihilate the symmetric space, corresponding to a massive decrease in environment entropy for states on the symmetric space compared to the maximally mixed state. This explains the enhanced coherent information as a manifestation of degeneracy for the resulting codes.