General description of discriminating quantum operations

G. Wang, Mingsheng Ying

Kejia Zhang, Ping Zhu, Fei Gao +3 more

The discrimination of quantum operations plays a key role in quantum information and computation. Unlike discriminating quantum states, it has some special properties which can be carried out in practice. In this paper, we provide a general description of discriminating quantum operations. Concretely speaking, we describe the distinguishability between quantum operations using a measure called operator fidelity. It is shown that, employing the theory of operator fidelity, we can not only verify some previous results to discriminate unitary operations, but also exhibit a more general discrimination condition. We further apply our results to analysing the security of some quantum cryptographic protocols and discuss the realization of our method using well-developed quantum algorithms.

Xiu-Hong Sun, Yuan Li

Atsushi Shimbo, Akihito Soeda, Mio Murao

We study equivalence determination of unitary operations, a task analogous to quantum state discrimination. The candidate states are replaced by unitary operations given as a quantum sample, i.e., a black-box device implementing a candidate unitary operation, and the discrimination target becomes another black-box. The task is an instance of higher-order quantum computation with the black-boxes as input. The optimal error probability is calculated by semidefinite programs. Arbitrary quantum operations applied between the black-boxes in a general protocol provide advantages over protocols restricted to parallelized use of the black-boxes. We provide a numerical proof of such an advantage. In contrast, a parallelized scheme is analytically shown to exhibit the optimal performance of general schemes for a particular number of quantum samples of the candidates. We find examples of finite-sample equivalence determination that achieve the same performance as when a classical description of the candidates are provided, although an exact classical description cannot be obtained from finite quantum samples.

Yuan Li, Xiu-Hong Sun, Yan-Ni Dou

Lü-Jun Li

We consider the problem of discriminating general quantum operations. Using the definition of mapping operator to vector, and by some calculating skills, we derive an explicit formulation as a new bound on the minimum-error probability for ambiguous discrimination between arbitrary m quantum operations. This formulation consists only of Kraus-operators, the dimension, and the priori probabilities of the discriminated quantum operations, and is independent of input states. To some extent, we further generalize the bounds on the minimum-error probability for discriminating mixed states to quantum operations.