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EPiC series in computing

On the Mathematical Boundaries of Communication with Zero-Capacity Quantum Channels

László Gyöngyösi, Sándor Imre

Published Jan 23, 2018• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

In the first decade of the 21st century, many revolutionary properties of quantum channels were discovered. These phenomena are purely quantum mechanical and completely unimaginable in classical systems. Recently, the most important discovery in Quantum Information Theory was the possibility of transmitting quantum information over zero-capacity quantum channels. In this work we prove that the possibility of superactivation of quantum channel capacities is determined by the mathematical properties of the quantum relative entropy function.

DOI
10.29007/7h1q

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In the first decade of the 21st century, many revolutionary properties of quantum channels were discovered. These phenomena are purely quantum mechanical and completely unimaginable in classical systems. Recently, the most important discovery in Quantum Information Theory was the possibility of transmitting quantum information over zero-capacity quantum channels. In this work we prove that the possibility of superactivation of quantum channel capacities is determined by the mathematical properties of the quantum relative entropy function.
In the theory of quantum communications, a deeper structure has been recently unveiled, showing that the capacity does not completely characterize the channel ability to transmit information due to phenomena – namely, superadditivity, superactivation and causal activation – with no counterpart in the classical world. Although how deep goes this structure is yet to be fully uncovered, it is crucial for the communication engineering community to own the implications of these phenomena for understanding and deriving the fundamental limits of communications. Hence, the aim of this treatise is to shed light on these phenomena by providing the reader with an easy access and guide towards the relevant literature and the prominent results from a communication engineering perspective.
In this work a new phenomenon called polaractivation is introduced. Polaractivation is based on quantum polar encoding and the result is similar to the superactivation effect — positive capacity can be achieved with zero-capacity quantum channels. However, polaractivation has many advantages over the superactivation: it is limited neither by any preliminary conditions on the quantum channel nor on the maps of other channels involved in the joint channel structure. We prove that the polaractivation works for arbitrary zero-private capacity quantum channels and we demonstrate, that the symmetric private classical capacity of arbitrary zero-private capacity quantum channels is polaractive.
In most communication scenarios, sending a symbol encoded in a quantum state requires spending resources such as energy, which can be quantified by a cost of communication. A standard approach in this context is to quantify the performance of communication protocol by classical capacity, quantifying the maximal amount of information that can be transmitted through a quantum channel per single use of the channel. However, different figures of merit are also possible and a particularly well-suited one is the classical capacity per unit cost, which quantifies the maximal amount of information that can be transmitted per unit cost. I generalize this concept to account for the quantum nature of the information carriers and communication channels and show that if there exists a state with cost equal to zero, e.g., a vacuum state, the capacity per unit cost can be expressed by a simple formula containing maximization of the relative entropy between two quantum states. This enables me to analyze the behavior of photon information efficiency for general communication tasks and show simple bounds on the capacity per unit cost in terms of quantities familiar from quantum estimation theory. I calculate also the capacity per unit cost for general Gaussian quantum channels.
Activation of quantum capacity is a surprising phenomenon according to which the quantum capacity of a certain channel may increase by combining it with another channel with zero quantum capacity. Superactivation describes an even more particular occurrence, in which both channels have zero quantum capacity, but their composition has a nonvanishing one. We investigate these effects for all single-mode phase-insensitive Gaussian channels, which include thermal attenuators and amplifiers, assisted by a two-mode positive-partial-transpose channel. Our result shows that activation phenomena are special but not uncommon. We can reveal superactivation in a broad range of thermal attenuator channels, even when the transmissivity is quite low, or the thermal noise is high. This means that we can transmit quantum information reliably through very noisy Gaussian channels with the help of another Gaussian channel, whose quantum capacity is also zero. We further show that no superactivation is possible for entanglement-breaking Gaussian channels in physically relevant circumstances by proving the nonactivation property of the coherent information of bosonic entanglement-breaking channels with finite input energy.
Capacities of quantum channels are fundamental quantities in the theory of quantum information. A desirable property is the additivity for a capacity measure. However, this cannot be achieved for a few quantities that have been established as capacity measures. Asymptotic regularization is generically necessary making the study of capacities notoriously hard. In this work, by a proper refinement of the physical settings of quantum communication using restricted encodings, we prove additive quantities for quantum channel capacities that can be employed for quantum Shannon theorems. This refinement is consistent with the principles of quantum theory, and it further demonstrates von Neumann entropy as the cornerstone of quantum information.