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Geometric and topological considerations for the closure of LOCC

Scott M. Cohen

Published Dec 5, 2019• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We point out a necessary condition that a quantum measurement can be implemented by the class of protocols known as Local Operations and Classical Communication, or LOCC, including in the limit of an infinite number of rounds. A generalization of this condition is then proven to hold for any measurement that is in the closure of that set, ${\bar{\textrm{LOCC}}}$. This generalization unifies, extends, and provides a geometric justification for previously known results on ${\bar{\text{LOCC}}}$, reproducing their consequences with regard to practical applications. We have also used our condition to answer a variety of long-standing, unsolved problems, including for distinguishability of certain sets of states by LOCC. These include various classes of unextendible product bases, for which we prove they cannot be distinguished by LOCC even when infinite resources are available and vanishing error is allowed.

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We point out a necessary condition that a quantum measurement can be implemented by the class of protocols known as Local Operations and Classical Communication, or LOCC, including in the limit of an infinite number of rounds. A generalization of this condition is then proven to hold for any measurement that is in the closure of that set, LOCCˉ{\bar{\textrm{LOCC}}}LOCCˉ. This generalization unifies, extends, and provides a geometric justification for previously known results on LOCCˉ{\bar{\text{LOCC}}}LOCCˉ, reproducing their consequences with regard to practical applications. We have also used our condition to answer a variety of long-standing, unsolved problems, including for distinguishability of certain sets of states by LOCC. These include various classes of unextendible product bases, for which we prove they cannot be distinguished by LOCC even when infinite resources are available and vanishing error is allowed.
We provide a necessary condition that a quantum measurement can be implemented by the class of protocols known as local operations and classical communication, or LOCC, including when an error is allowed but must vanish in the limit of an infinite number of rounds, a case referred to as asymptotic LOCC. Our condition unifies, extends, and provides an intuitive, geometric justification for previous results on asymptotic LOCC. We use our condition to answer a variety of long-standing, unsolved problems, including for distinguishability of certain sets of states by LOCC. These include various classes of unextendible product bases, for which we prove they cannot be distinguished by LOCC even when infinite resources are available and an asymptotically vanishing error is allowed.
We give a necessary condition that a separable measurement can be implemented by local quantum operations and classical communication (LOCC) in any finite number of rounds of communication, generalizing and strengthening a result obtained previously. That earlier result involved a bound that is tight when the number of measurement operators defining the measurement is relatively small. The present results generalize that bound to one that is tight for any finite number of measurement operators, and we also provide an extension which holds when that number is infinite. We apply these results to the famous example on a $3\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}3$ system known as ``domino states,'' which were the first demonstration of nonlocality without entanglement. Our extended necessary condition provides another way of showing that these states cannot be perfectly distinguished by (finite-round) LOCC. It directly shows that this conclusion also holds for their related rotated domino states. We also introduce a class of problems involving the unambiguous discrimination of quantum states, each of which is an example where the states can be optimally discriminated by a separable measurement, but according to our condition, cannot be optimally discriminated by LOCC. These examples nicely illustrate the usefulness of the present results, since our earlier necessary condition, which the present result generalizes, is not strong enough to reach a conclusion in any of these cases.
Every measurement that can be implemented by local quantum operations and classical communication (LOCC) using an infinite number of rounds is the limit of a sequence of measurements, where each measurement in the sequence requires only a finite number of rounds. This rather obvious and well-known fact is nonetheless of interest as it shows that these infinite-round measurements can be approximated arbitrarily closely simply by using more and more rounds of communication. Here we demonstrate the perhaps less obvious result that (at least) for bipartite systems, the reverse relationship also holds. Specifically, we show that every finite-round bipartite LOCC measurement is the limit of a continuous sequence of LOCC measurements, where each measurement in that sequence can be implemented by LOCC, but only with the use of an infinite number of rounds. Thus, the set of LOCC measurements that require an infinite number of rounds is dense in the entirety of LOCC, as is the set of finite-round LOCC measurements. This means there exist measurements that can only be implemented by LOCC by using an infinite number of rounds, but can nonetheless be approximated closely by using one round of communication, and actually in some cases, no communication is needed at all. These results follow from a necessary condition presented here for finite-round LOCC, which is extremely simple to check, is very easy to prove, and which can be violated by utilizing an infinite number of rounds.
Every measurement that can be implemented by local quantum operations and classical communication (LOCC) using an infinite number of rounds is the limit of a sequence of measurements each of which requires only a finite number of rounds. This rather obvious and well-known fact is nonetheless of interest as it shows that these infinite-round measurements can be approximated arbitrarily closely simply by using more and more rounds of communication. Here we demonstrate the perhaps less obvious result that (at least) for bipartite systems, the reverse relationship also holds. Specifically, we show that every finite-round bipartite LOCC measurement is the limit of a continuous sequence of LOCC measurements, where each measurement in that sequence can be implemented by LOCC, but only with the use of an infinite number of rounds. Thus, the set of LOCC measurements that require an infinite number of rounds is dense in the entirety of LOCC, as is the set of finite-round LOCC measurements. This means there exist measurements that can only be implemented by LOCC by using an infinite number of rounds, but can nonetheless be approximated closely by using one round of communication, and actually in some cases, no communication is needed at all. These results follow from a new necessary condition for finite-round LOCC, which is extremely simple to check, is very easy to prove, and which can be violated by utilizing an infinite number of rounds.
In this thesis we study the subset of quantum operations that can be implemented using only local quantum operations and classical communication (LOCC). This restricted paradigm serves as a tool to study not only quantum correlations and other nonlocal quantum effects, but also resource transformations such as channel capacities. \n \nThe mathematical structure of LOCC is complex and difficult to characterize. In the first part of this thesis we provide a precise description of LOCC and related operational classes in terms of quantum instruments. Our formalism captures both finite round protocols as well as those that utilize an unbounded number of communication rounds. This perspective allows us to measure the distance between two LOCC instruments and hence discuss the closure of LOCC in a rigorous way. While the set of LOCC is not topologically closed, we show that the operations that can be implemented using some fixed number rounds of communication constitute a compact subset of all quantum operations. We also exhibit a subset of LOCC measurements that is closed. Additionally we establish the existence of an open ball around the completely depolarizing map consisting entirely of LOCC implementable maps. \n \nIn the second part of this thesis we focus on the task of discriminating states from some known set S by LOCC. Building on the work in the paper "Quantum nonlocality without entanglement", we provide a framework for lower bounding the error probability of any LOCC protocol aiming at discriminating the states from S. We apply our framework to an orthonormal product basis known as the domino states. This gives an alternative and simplified bound quantifying how well these states can be discriminated using LOCC. We generalize this result for similar bases in larger dimensions, as well as the "rotated" domino states, resolving a long-standing open question. These results give new examples of quantitative gaps between the classes of separable and LOCC operations. \n \nIn the last part of this thesis, we ask what differentiates separable from LOCC operations. Both of these classes play a key role in the study of entanglement. Separable operations are known to be strictly more powerful than LOCC ones, but no simple explanation of this phenomenon is known. We show that, in the case of bipartite von Neumann measurements, the ability to interpolate is an operational principle that separates LOCC and separable operations.
Given a protocol P\mathcal{P}P that implements multipartite quantum channel E\mathcal{E}E by repeated rounds of local operations and classical communication (LOCC), we construct an alternate LOCC protocol for E\mathcal{E}E in no more rounds than P\mathcal{P}P and no more than a fixed, constant number of outcomes for each local measurement, the same constant number for every party and every round. We then obtain another upper bound on the number of outcomes that, under certain conditions, improves on the first. The latter bound shows that for LOCC channels that are extreme points of the convex set of all quantum channels, the parties can restrict the number of outcomes in their individual local measurements to no more than the square of their local Hilbert space dimension, ${d}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$, suggesting a possible link between the required resources for LOCC and the convex structure of the set of all quantum channels. Our bounds on the number of outcomes indicating the need for only constant resources per round, independent of the number of rounds rrr including when that number is infinite, are a stark contrast to the exponential rrr dependence in the only previously published bound of which we are aware. If a lower bound is known on the number of product operators needed to represent the channel, we obtain a lower bound on the number of rounds required to implement the given channel by LOCC. Finally, we show that when the quantum channel is not required but only that a given task be implemented deterministically, then no more than ${d}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{2}$ outcomes are needed for each local measurement by party $\ensuremath{\alpha}$.