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Quantum communication under channel uncertainty

Janis Nötzel

Published Jan 1, 2012• 1 citation
OpenAlex

Abstract

This work contains results concerning transmission of entanglement and subspaces as well as generation of entanglement in the limit of arbitrary many uses of compound- and arbitrarily varying quantum channels (CQC, AVQC). In both cases, the channel is described by a set of memoryless channels. Only forward communication between one sender and one receiver is allowed. A code is said to be „good“ only, if it is „good“ for every channel out of the set. Both settings describe a scenario, in which sender and receiver have only limited channel knowledge. For different amounts of information about the channel available to sender or receiver, coding theorems are proven for the CQC. For the AVQC, both deterministic and randomised coding schemes are considered. Coding theorems are proven, as well as a quantum analogue of the Ahlswede-dichotomy. The connection to zero-error capacities of stationary memoryless quantum channels is investigated. The notion of symmetrisability is defined and used for both classes of channels.

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This work contains results concerning transmission of entanglement and subspaces as well as generation of entanglement in the limit of arbitrary many uses of compound- and arbitrarily varying quantum channels (CQC, AVQC).
In both cases, the channel is described by a set of memoryless channels. Only forward communication between one sender and one receiver is allowed. A code is said to be „good“ only, if it is „good“ for every channel out of the set.
Both settings describe a scenario, in which sender and receiver have only limited channel knowledge.
For different amounts of information about the channel available to sender or receiver, coding theorems are proven for the CQC.
For the AVQC, both deterministic and randomised coding schemes are considered. Coding theorems are proven, as well as a quantum analogue of the Ahlswede-dichotomy.
The connection to zero-error capacities of stationary memoryless quantum channels is investigated.
The notion of symmetrisability is defined and used for both classes of channels.
We investigate entanglement transmission over an unknown channel in the presence of a third party (called the adversary), which is enabled to choose the channel from a given set of memoryless but non-stationary channels without informing the legitimate sender and receiver about the particular choice that he made. This channel model is called an arbitrarily varying quantum channel (AVQC). We derive a quantum version of Ahlswede's dichotomy for classical arbitrarily varying channels. This includes a regularized formula for the common randomness-assisted capacity for entanglement transmission of an AVQC. Quite surprisingly and in contrast to the classical analog of the problem involving the maximal and average error probability, we find that the capacity for entanglement transmission of an AVQC always equals its strong subspace transmission capacity. These results are accompanied by different notions of symmetrizability (zero-capacity conditions) as well as by conditions for an AVQC to have a capacity described by a single-letter formula. In the final part of the paper the capacity of the erasure-AVQC is computed and some light shed on the connection between AVQCs and zero-error capacities. Additionally, we show by entirely elementary and operational arguments motivated by the theory of AVQCs that the quantum, classical, and entanglement-assisted zero-error capacities of quantum channels are generically zero and are discontinuous at every positivity point.
We derive a regularized formula for the common randomness assisted entanglement transmission capacity of finite arbitrarily varying quantum channels (AVQC's). For finite AVQC's with positive capacity for classical message transmission we show, by derandomization through classical forward communication, that the random capacity for entanglement transmission equals the deterministic capacity for entanglement transmission. This is a quantum version of the famous Ahlswede dichotomy. In the infinite case, we derive a similar result for certain classes of AVQC's. At last, we give two possible definitions of symmetrizability of an AVQC.
If a sender and a receiver lack precise knowledge about the communication line that connects them, designing a scheme to reliably transmit information becomes more challenging. This has been studied in classical and quantum information theory in the context of compound channel models and arbitrarily varying channel models. However, a fully quantum version of system uncertainty allows for an even more challenging coding scenario with entangled channel uses. This type of model has previously been investigated for classical and quantum capacity. Here, we address the problem of entanglement-assisted capacity in the presence of such system uncertainty. We find that, under the assumption of a finite environment dimension, it is equal to a corresponding compound capacity. Intriguingly, our results imply that in certain fully quantum arbitrarily varying channel models, the entanglement-assisted capacity can be positive while the classical capacity is equal to zero, a phenomenon that does not occur in regular single-channel coding.
In this paper we address the issue of universal or robust communication over quantum channels. Specifically, we consider a memoryless communication scenario with channel uncertainty which is an analog of the compound channel in classical information theory. We determine the quantum capacity of finite compound channels and arbitrary compound channels with an informed decoder. Our approach in the finite case is based on the observation that perfect channel knowledge at the decoder does not increase the capacity of finite quantum compound channels. As a consequence, we obtain a coding theorem for finite quantum averaged channels, the simplest class of channels with long-term memory. The extension of these results to quantum compound channels with uninformed encoder and decoder and infinitely many constituents remains an open problem.
This work is motivated by a quite general question: Under which circumstances are the capacities of information transmission systems continuous? The research is explicitly carried out on arbitrarily varying quantum channels (AVQCs). We give an explicit example that answers the recent question whether the transmission of messages over AVQCs can benefit from distribution of randomness between the legitimate sender and receiver in the affirmative. The specific class of channels introduced in that example is then extended to show that the deterministic capacity does have discontinuity points, while that behaviour is, at the same time, not generic: We show that it is continuous around its positivity points. This is in stark contrast to the randomness-assisted capacity, which is always continuous in the channel. Our results imply that the deterministic message transmission capacity of an AVQC can be discontinuous only in points where it is zero, while the randomness assisted capacity is nonzero. Apart from the zero-error capacities, this is the first result that shows a discontinuity of a capacity for a large class of quantum channels. The continuity of the respective capacity for memoryless quantum channels had, among others, been listed as an open problem on the problem page of the ITP Hannover for about six years before it was proven to be continuous. We also quantify the interplay between the distribution of finite amounts of randomness between the legitimate sender and receiver, the (nonzero) decoding error with respect to the average error criterion that can be achieved over a finite number of channel uses and the number of messages that can be sent. This part of our results also applies to entanglement- and strong subspace transmission. In addition, we give a new sufficient criterion for the entanglement transmission capacity with randomness assistance to vanish.
We analyze different aspects of multiparty communication over quantum memoryless channels and generalize some of the key results known from bipartite channels to the multiparty scenario. In particular, we introduce multiparty versions of subspace and entanglement transmission fidelities. We also provide alternative, local, versions of fidelities and show their equivalence to the global ones in context of capacity regions defined. An equivalence of two different capacity notions with respect to two types of fidelities is proven. In analogy to the bipartite case it is shown, via sufficiency of isometric encoding theorem, that additional classical forward side channel does not increase capacity region of any quantum channel with kkk senders and mmm receivers which represents a compact unit of general quantum networks theory. The result proves that recently provided capacity region of a multiple access channel [M. Horodecki et al., Nature 436, 673 (2005); J. Yard et al., e-print quant-ph/0501045], is optimal also in a scenario of an additional support of forward classical communication.