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Quantum Communications and Quantum Imaging

Optimal state discrimination over quantum channels

Joonwoo Bae

Published Sep 6, 2019• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum state discrimination is a fundamental task in quantum information theory and also an important building block in practical quantum information applications. We here consider optimal state discrimination in a noisy environment in which quantum states may be corrupted due to the intervention of an environment. We show that even if there exists an unwanted interaction with an environment and the channel describing the interaction is not yet identified, a measurement prepared in the beginning for optimal state discrimination can be preserved as an optimal measurement ever after a channel use. This means that in a practical realization of quantum communication, verification of a channel can be circumvented and the cost of quantum tomography is saved. We also show a protocol of preserving an optimal measurement for state discrimination.

DOI
10.1117/12.2525569

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Quantum state discrimination is a fundamental task in quantum information theory and also an important building block in practical quantum information applications. We here consider optimal state discrimination in a noisy environment in which quantum states may be corrupted due to the intervention of an environment. We show that even if there exists an unwanted interaction with an environment and the channel describing the interaction is not yet identified, a measurement prepared in the beginning for optimal state discrimination can be preserved as an optimal measurement ever after a channel use. This means that in a practical realization of quantum communication, verification of a channel can be circumvented and the cost of quantum tomography is saved. We also show a protocol of preserving an optimal measurement for state discrimination.
In this work, we consider optimal discrimination among quantum states that are sent through a quantum channel. We show the conditions on a quantum channel and an ensemble of states to preserve a measurement for optimal state discrimination over the channel. In particular, we show that for an ensemble of states where the states are given with equal a priori probabilities, an optimal measurement can be preserved over any quantum channel by applying local operations and classical communication, that is, by manipulating the quantum states before and after the channel application. Examples are provided for illustration in the case of quantum communication protocols. Our results can be readily applied to optimal state discrimination over various types of noise.
One of the consequences in the distribution of quantum states over a long distance is that, since resulting quantum states are noisy due to the intervention of an environment, a measurement setting should be re-aligned to optimize detection events, for which additional experimental resources such as quantum tomography of a channel or resulting states is necessary. In this work, we present a protocol for protecting an optimal measurement setup without verifying a channel. A receiver does not have to revise the measurement prepared in a noiseless scenario since it would remain optimal for quantum states resulting from an unknown and noisy channel. The measurement protection protocol realizes a supermap describing transformations over quantum channels and is experimentally feasible as it only applies local unitary transformations before and after the transmission. We present experimental proof-of-principle demonstrations of the measurement protection protocol. We also apply the measurement protection to a prepare-and-measure protocol, the Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) protocol, and find that preserving an optimal measurement can suppress quantum-bit error rates, allowing the protocol to tolerate an even higher noise during transmission. The BB84 protocol with the measurement protection is experimentally demonstrated with the polarization encoding on photonic qubits.
We consider a special form of state discrimination in which after the measurement we are given additional information that may help us identify the state. This task plays a central role in the analysis of quantum cryptographic protocols in the noisy-storage model, where the identity of the state corresponds to a certain bit string, and the additional information is typically a choice of encoding that is initially unknown to the cheating party. We first provide simple optimality conditions for measurements for any such problem, and show upper and lower bounds on the success probability. For a certain class of problems, we furthermore provide tight bounds on how useful post-measurement information can be. In particular, we show that for this class finding the optimal measurement for the task of state discrimination with post-measurement information does in fact reduce to solving a different problem of state discrimination without such information. However, we show that for the corresponding classical state discrimination problems with post-measurement information such a reduction is impossible, by relating the success probability to the violation of Bell inequalities. This suggests the usefulness of post-measurement information as another feature that distinguishes the classical from a quantum world.
We consider a special form of state discrimination in which after the measurement we are given additional information that may help us identify the state. This task plays a central role in the analysis of quantum cryptographic protocols in the noisy-storage model, where the identity of the state corresponds to a certain bit string, and the additional information is typically a choice of encoding that is initially unknown to the cheating party. We first provide simple optimality conditions for measurements for any such problem and show upper and lower bounds on the success probability. For a certain class of problems, we furthermore provide tight bounds on how useful postmeasurement information can be. In particular, we show that for this class finding the optimal measurement for the task of state discrimination with postmeasurement information does in fact reduce to solving a different problem of state discrimination without such information. However, we show that for the corresponding classical state discrimination problems with postmeasurement information such a reduction is impossible, by relating the success probability to the violation of Bell inequalities. This suggests the usefulness of postmeasurement information as another feature that distinguishes the classical from a quantum world.
In this work, we consider the preservation of a measurement for quantum systems interacting with an environment. Namely, a method of preserving an optimal measurement over a channel is devised, what we call channel coding of a quantum measurement in that operations are applied before and after a channel in order to protect a measurement. A protocol that preserves a quantum measurement over an arbitrary channel is shown only with local operations and classical communication without the use of a larger Hilbert space. Therefore, the protocol is readily feasible with present day's technologies. Channel coding of qubit measurements is presented, and it is shown that a measurement can be preserved for an arbitrary channel for both i) pairs of qubit states and ii) ensembles of equally probable states. The protocol of preserving a quantum measurement is demonstrated with IBM quantum computers.