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Physical Review A

Comparison of error probability bounds in quantum state discrimination

Roberto Corvaja

Published Apr 23, 2013• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In quantum discrimination, the value of the minimum error probability and the set of measurement operators which achieve this minimum are often difficult to derive. Here we present a comparison of the performance obtained by the optimal solution and by the available bounds, namely the square root measurement (SRM) and the Chernoff bound. Applied to some Gaussian states, namely to coherent states with thermal noise, it is shown that the SRM provides a much tighter bound with respect to the Chernoff bound, with a comparable numerical complexity.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.87.042329

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In quantum discrimination, the value of the minimum error probability and the set of measurement operators which achieve this minimum are often difficult to derive. Here we present a comparison of the performance obtained by the optimal solution and by the available bounds, namely the square root measurement (SRM) and the Chernoff bound. Applied to some Gaussian states, namely to coherent states with thermal noise, it is shown that the SRM provides a much tighter bound with respect to the Chernoff bound, with a comparable numerical complexity.
Distinguishing assigned quantum states with assigned probabilities via quantum measurements is a crucial problem for the transmission of classical information through quantum channels. Measurement operators maximizing the probability of correct discrimination have been characterized by Helstrom, Holevo, and Yuen since the 1970s. On the other hand, closed-form solutions are available only for particular situations enjoying high degrees of symmetry. As a suboptimal solution to the problem, measurement operators, directly determined from states and probabilities and known as square-root measurements (SRMs), were introduced by Hausladen and Wootters. These operators were also recognized to be optimal for pure states equipped with geometrical uniform symmetry (GUS). In this paper we discuss the optimality of the SRM and find necessary and sufficient conditions in order that SRM maximize the correct decision probabilities for the set of states formed by several constellations of GUS states. The results are applied to some specific examples concerning double constellations of quantum phase-shift keying and pulse-position modulation states, with possible applications to practical systems of quantum communications.
In the problem of quantum state discrimination, one has to determine by measurements the state of a quantum system, based on the a priori side information that the true state is one of the two given and completely known states, ρ or σ. In general, it is not possible to decide the identity of the true state with certainty, and the optimal measurement strategy depends on whether the two possible errors (mistaking ρ for σ, or the other way around) are treated as of equal importance or not. Results on the quantum Chernoff and Hoeffding bounds and the quantum Stein's lemma show that, if several copies of the system are available then the optimal error probabilities decay exponentially in the number of copies, and the decay rate is given by a certain statistical distance between ρ and σ (the Chernoff distance, the Hoeffding distances, and the relative entropy, respectively). While these results provide a complete solution to the asymptotic problem, they are not completely satisfying from a practical point of view. Indeed, in realistic scenarios one has access only to finitely many copies of a system, and therefore it is desirable to have bounds on the error probabilities for finite sample size. In this paper we provide finite-size bounds on the so-called Stein errors, the Chernoff errors, the Hoeffding errors, and the mixed error probabilities related to the Chernoff and the Hoeffding errors.
We consider the problem of constructing measurements optimized to distinguish between a collection of possibly nonorthogonal quantum states. We consider a collection of pure states and seek a positive operator-valued measure (POVM) consisting of rank-one operators with measurement vectors closest in squared norm to the given states. We compare our results to previous measurements suggested by Peres and Wootters (1991) and Hausladen et al. (1996), where we refer to the latter as the square-root measurement (SRM). We obtain a new characterization of the SRM, and prove that it is optimal in a least-squares sense. In addition, we show that for a geometrically uniform state set the SRM minimizes the probability of a detection error. This generalizes a similar result of Ban et al. (see Int. J. Theor. Phys., vol.36, p.1269-88, 1997).
We consider the task of distinguishing whether a quantum system is prepared in a state from one of several sets of quantum states. Assuming their convexity and stability under tensor product, we prove that the optimal error exponent for discrimination is precisely given by the regularized quantum Chernoff divergence between the sets, thereby establishing a generalized quantum Chernoff bound for the discrimination of multiple sets of quantum states. This extends the classical and quantum Chernoff bounds to the general setting of composite and correlated quantum hypotheses. Furthermore, leveraging minimax theorems, we show that discriminating between sets of quantum states is no harder than discriminating between their worst-case elements in terms of error probability. This implies the existence of an optimal state-agnostic test that achieves the minimum error probability for all states in the sets, matching the performance of the optimal state-dependent test for the most difficult pair of states. We provide explicit characterizations of the optimal state-agnostic test in the binary composite case. Finally, we show that the maximum overlap between a pure state and a set of free states, a quantity that frequently arises in quantum resource theories, is equal to the quantum Chernoff divergence between the sets, thereby providing an operational interpretation of this quantity in the context of symmetric hypothesis testing.
We propose an upper bound on the maximum correct probability of quantum measurements. The proposed bound is obtained by a suboptimal solution to the dual problem of the optimal state discrimination problems. We derive that a slightly modified version of the proposed bound is tighter than that proposed by Qiu et al. [Phys. Rev. A 81, 042329 (2010)]. We also propose an upper bound on the maximum correct probability with a fixed rate of inconclusive results. The performance of the proposed bounds are evaluated through numerical experiments.