Following initial work by JaJa, and Ahlswede and Cai, and inspired by a recent renewed surge in interest in deterministic identification (DI) via noisy channels, we consider the problem in its generality for memoryless channels with finite output, but arbitrary input alphabets. Such a channel is essentially given by (the closure of) the subset of its output distributions in the probability simplex. Our main findings are that the maximum number of messages thus identifiable scales super-exponentially as
2Rnlognwith the block length
n, and that the optimal rate
Ris upper and lower bounded in terms of the covering (aka Minkowski, or Kolmogorov, or entropy) dimension
dof a certain algebraic transformation of the output set:
41d≤R≤21d, Along the way, we present a Hypothesis Testing Lemma that shows it is sufficient to ensure pairwise reliable distinguishability of the output distributions to construct a DI code. Although we do not know the exact capacity formula, we can conclude that the DI capacity exhibits super-activation: there exist channels whose capacity is zero, but whose product has positive capacity. These results are then generalised to classical-quantum channels with finite-dimensional output quantum system (but arbitrary input alphabet), and in particular to quantum channels on finite-dimensional quantum systems under the constraint that the identification code can only use tensor product inputs.
A seminal result of Hastings showed that entangled inputs can increase the rate of classical communication through independent uses of a quantum channel. While Hastings' result proved the existence of this phenomenon, it has remained a major open problem to find an explicit channel with this property. In this work, we resolve this question by constructing an explicit family of finite-dimensional quantum channels for which entangling inputs between pairs of channel uses yields an unbounded separation from the achievable communication rate using unentangled inputs. We describe a circuit implementation of our channel that uses only deterministic qudit Clifford unitaries and a single binary measurement with classical feedforward. The key ingredient is a careful design of the measurement and feedforward process that yields the required one-copy and two-copy output entropy bounds from moment estimates alone, without requiring strong convergence of the underlying unitary family.