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Physical Review A

Limits on the ability of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pairs to unambiguously convey classical messages

Lvjun Li

Published May 7, 2012• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this paper, we consider two related problems, unambiguous discrimination of quantum mixed states and unambiguously conveying classical messages using Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs. The main technical contributions are as follows. First, we present a general upper bound on the success probability for unambiguous discrimination among arbitrary $N$ mixed quantum states with given a priori probability, which can be directly used to the unambiguous communication setting. Second, we propose a sufficient condition to show that a new upper bound can be achievable, and construct examples to clarify the relationship between the upper bound we derive and the existing upper bounds presented by other authors. Third, in the issue of conveying classical messages using EPR pairs, we also derive an upper bound on the success probability for unambiguously decoding, where Alice wants to convey $n$ bit classical information to Bob by sending $m$ quantum bits.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.85.052304

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In this paper, we consider two related problems, unambiguous discrimination of quantum mixed states and unambiguously conveying classical messages using Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs. The main technical contributions are as follows. First, we present a general upper bound on the success probability for unambiguous discrimination among arbitrary NNN mixed quantum states with given a priori probability, which can be directly used to the unambiguous communication setting. Second, we propose a sufficient condition to show that a new upper bound can be achievable, and construct examples to clarify the relationship between the upper bound we derive and the existing upper bounds presented by other authors. Third, in the issue of conveying classical messages using EPR pairs, we also derive an upper bound on the success probability for unambiguously decoding, where Alice wants to convey nnn bit classical information to Bob by sending mmm quantum bits.
The capacity of quantum states to send information is a fundamental and intriguing issue in quantum communication theory. This study explores a scenario where Alice intends to transmit n bits of classical information to Bob by sending m qudits, using an arbitrary bipartite pure entangled state with E qudits as the shared resource. We employ the unambiguous discrimination strategy in decoding and establish an upper bound on the success probability, which extends the findings of a previous study (Li in Phys Rev A 85:052304, 2012).
In this paper, we present a general upper bound on the success probability for unambiguous discrimination among arbitrary mmm mixed quantum states with given a priori probability. We further analyze how this upper bound can be achievable by presenting a sufficient condition related to it, and we compare this upper bound with three other upper bounds. Moreover, for the issue of the unambiguous identification of mmm unknown multicopy qudit pure states, we also get a bound.
In this thesis we study the problem of unambiguously discriminating two mixed quantum states. We first present reduction theorems for optimal unambiguous discrimination of two generic density matrices. We show that this problem can be reduced to that of two density matrices that have the same rank rrr in a 2rrr-dimensional Hilbert space. These reduction theorems also allow us to reduce USD problems to simpler ones for which the solution might be known. As an application, we consider the unambiguous comparison of nnn linearly independent pure states with a simple symmetry. Moreover, lower bounds on the optimal failure probability have been derived. For two mixed states they are given in terms of the fidelity. Here we give tighter bounds as well as necessary and sufficient conditions for two mixed states to reach these bounds. We also construct the corresponding optimal measurement. With this result, we provide analytical solutions for unambiguously discriminating a class of generic mixed states. This goes beyond known results which are all reducible to some pure state case. We however show that examples exist where the bounds cannot be reached. Next, we derive properties on the rank and the spectrum of an optimal USD measurement. This finally leads to a second class of exact solutions. Indeed we present the optimal failure probability as well as the optimal measurement for unambiguously discriminating any pair of geometrically uniform mixed states in four dimensions. This class of problems includes for example the discrimination of both the basis and the bit value mixed states in the BB84 QKD protocol with coherent states.
The minimum-error probability of ambiguous discrimination for two quantum states is the well-known {\it Helstrom limit} presented in 1976. Since then, it has been thought of as an intractable problem to obtain the minimum-error probability for ambiguously discriminating arbitrary mmm quantum states. In this paper, we obtain a new lower bound on the minimum-error probability for ambiguous discrimination and compare this bound with six other bounds in the literature. Moreover, we show that the bound between ambiguous and unambiguous discrimination does not extend to ensembles of more than two states. Specifically, the main technical contributions are described as follows: (1) We derive a new lower bound on the minimum-error probability for ambiguous discrimination among arbitrary mmm mixed quantum states with given prior probabilities, and we present a necessary and sufficient condition to show that this lower bound is attainable. (2) We compare this new lower bound with six other bounds in the literature in detail, and, in some cases, this bound is optimal. (3) It is known that if m=2m=2m=2, the optimal inconclusive probability of unambiguous discrimination QUQ_{U}QU​ and the minimum-error probability of ambiguous discrimination QEQ_{E}QE​ between arbitrary given mmm mixed quantum states have the relationship QU≥2QEQ_{U}\geq 2Q_{E}QU​≥2QE​. In this paper, we show that, however, if m>2m>2m>2, the relationship QU≥2QEQ_{U}\geq 2Q_{E}QU​≥2QE​ may not hold again in general, and there may be no supremum of QU/QEQ_{U}/Q_{E}QU​/QE​ for more than two states, which may also reflect an essential difference between discrimination for two-states and multi-states. (4) A number of examples are constructed.
We revisit the problem of conveying classical messages by transmitting quantum states, and derive new, optimal bounds on the number of quantum bits required for this task. Much of the previous work on this problem, and on other communication tasks in the setting of bounded error entanglement-assisted communication, is based on sophisticated information theoretic arguments. Our results are derived from first principles, using a simple linear algebraic technique. A direct consequence is a tight lower bound for the Inner Product function that has found applications to privacy amplification in quantum key distribution protocols.
As is well known, operations on one particle of an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pair cannot influence the marginal statistics of measurements on the other particle. We characterize the set of states accessible from an initial EPR state by one-particle operations and show that in a sense they allow two bits to be encoded reliably in one spin-1/2 particle: One party, ``Alice,'' prepares an EPR pair and sends one of the particles to another party, ``Bob,'' who applies one of four unitary operators to the particle, and then returns it to Alice. By measuring the two particles jointly, Alice can now reliably learn which operator Bob used.