Asym m etric quantum clonin g in an y d im en sion
Nicolas J. Cerf
Abstract
Abstrac t. A family of asymmetric cloning machines for N-dimensional quantum states is introduced. These machines produce two imperfect copies of a single state that emerge from non-identical Heisenberg channels. The trade-oA between the quality of the copies imposed by quantum mechanics is shown to result from a complementarity akin to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. More speci® cally, the probability distributions of the error operators aA ecting the two copies are the square modulus of two functions related by a Fourier transform. A no-cloning inequality is derived for the special case of isotropic cloners, quantifying the impossibility of perfect cloning: if oa and ob are the depolarizing fractions associated with the two copies, the domain in …o 1=2 a ;o 1=2 b †-space located inside a particular ellipse representing close-to-perfect cloning is forbidden. More generally, an entropic no-cloning uncertainty relation is also discussed. Finally, the class of asymmetric cloning machines for quantum bits is investigated in detail, and a connection with the capacity of the Pauli channel is displayed.