This chapter introduces the notions of classical and quantum information and discusses simple protocols for their exchange. It defines the entropy as a quantitative measure of information, and investigates its mathematical properties and operational meaning. It discusses the extent to which classical information can be carried by a quantum system and derives a pertinent upper bound, the Holevo bound. One important application of quantum communication is the secure distribution of cryptographic keys; a pertinent protocol, the BB84 protocol, is discussed in detail. Moreover, the chapter explains two protocols where previously shared entanglement plays a key role, superdense coding and teleportation. These are employed to effectively double the classical information carrying capacity of a qubit, or to transmit a quantum state with classical bits, respectively. It is shown that both protocols are optimal.
This chapter introduces the notions of classical and quantum information and discusses simple protocols for their exchange. It defines the entropy as a quantitative measure of information, and investigates its mathematical properties and operational meaning. It discusses the extent to which classical information can be carried by a quantum system and derives a pertinent upper bound, the Holevo bound. One important application of quantum communication is the secure distribution of cryptographic keys; a pertinent protocol, the BB84 protocol, is discussed in detail. Moreover, the chapter explains two protocols where previously shared entanglement plays a key role, superdense coding and teleportation. These are employed to effectively double the classical information carrying capacity of a qubit, or to transmit a quantum state with classical bits, respectively. It is shown that both protocols are optimal.
Abstract This chapter introduces three important quantum communication protocols: quantum teleportation, superdense coding, and quantum key distribution (QKD). The first two use entanglement as a resource, in the case of teleportation to transmit a quantum state and in the case of superdense coding to transmit two (classical) bits using a single qubit. QKD uses the non-determinism of quantum measurements to achieve unconditionally secure communication, and the chapter presents the original QKD protocol, namely BB84.
This chapter begins our first exciting application of the postulates of the quantum theory to quantum communication. We study the fundamental, unit quantum communication protocols. These protocols involve a single sender Alice and a single receiver Bob. The protocols are ideal and noiseless because we assume that Alice and Bob can exploit perfect classical communication, perfect quantum communication, and perfect entanglement. At the end of this chapter, we suggest how to incorporate imperfections into these protocols for later study. Alice and Bob may wish to perform one of several quantum informationprocessing tasks, such as the transmission of classical information, quantum information, or entanglement. Several fundamental protocols make use of these resources: 1. We will see that noiseless entanglement is an important resource in quantum Shannon theory because it enables Alice and Bob to perform other protocols that are not possible with classical resources only. We will present a simple, idealized protocol for generating entanglement, named entanglement distribution . 2. Alice may wish to communicate classical information to Bob. A trivial method, named elementary coding , is a simple way of doing so and we discuss it briefly. 3. A more interesting technique for transmitting classical information is superdense coding . It exploits a noiseless qubit channel and shared entanglement to transmit more classical information than would be possible with a noiseless qubit channel alone. 4. Finally, Alice may wish to transmit quantum information to Bob. A trivial method for her to do so is to exploit a noiseless qubit channel. However, it is useful to have other ways for transmitting quantum information because such a resource is difficult to engineer in practice. An alternative, surprising method for transmitting quantum information is quantum teleportation . The teleportation protocol exploits classical communication and shared entanglement to transmit quantum information. Each of these protocols is a fundamental unit protocol and provides a foundation for asking further questions in quantum Shannon theory. In fact, the discovery of these latter two protocols was the stimulus for much of the original research in quantum Shannon theory. One could take each of these protocols and ask about its performance if one or more of the resources involved is noisy rather than noiseless. Later chapters of this book explore many of these possibilities.
This chapter is concerned with the measure of information contained in qubits . This can be done only through quantum measurement , an operation that has no counterpart in the classical domain. I shall first describe in detail the case of single qubit measurements, which shows under which measurement conditions “classical” bits can be retrieved. Next, we consider the measurements of higher-order or n -qubits. Particular attention is given to the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) or Bell states , which, unlike other joint tensor states, are shown being entangled . The various single-qubit measurement outcomes from the EPR–Bell states illustrate an effect of causality in the information concerning the other qubit. We then focus on the technique of Bell measurement , which makes it possible to know which Bell state is being measured, yielding two classical bits as the outcome. The property of EPR–Bell state entanglement is exploited in the principle of quantum superdense coding , which makes it possible to transmit classical bits at twice the classical rate, namely through the generation and measurement of a single qubit. Another key application concerns quantum teleportation . It consists of the transmission of quantum states over arbitrary distances, by means of a common EPR–Bell state resource shared by the two channel ends. While quantum teleportation of a qubit is instantaneous, owing to the effect of quantum-state collapse, it is shown that its completion does require the communication of two classical bits , which is itself limited by the speed of light.
This chapter begins our first exciting application of the postulates of the quantum theory to quantum communication. We study the fundamental, unit quantum communication protocols. These protocols involve a single sender, whom we name Alice, and a single receiver, whom we name Bob. The protocols are ideal and noiseless because we assume that Alice and Bob can exploit perfect classical communication, perfect quantum communication, and perfect entanglement. At the end of this chapter, we suggest how to incorporate imperfections into these protocols for later study. Alice and Bob may wish to perform one of several quantum information-processing tasks, such as the transmission of classical information, quantum information, or entanglement. Several fundamental protocols make use of these resources: 1. We will see that noiseless entanglement is an important resource in quantum Shannon theory because it enables Alice and Bob to perform other protocols that are not possible with classical resources only. We will present a simple, idealized protocol for generating entanglement, named entanglement distribution . 2. Alice may wish to communicate classical information to Bob. A trivial method, named elementary coding , is a simple way for doing so and we discuss it briefly. 3. A more interesting technique for transmitting classical information is superdense coding . It exploits a noiseless qubit channel and shared entanglement to transmit more classical information than would be possible with a noiseless qubit channel alone. […]
We are now ready to look at our first protocols for quantum information. In this section, we examine two communication protocols which can be implemented using the tools we have developed in the preceding sections. These protocols are known as superdense coding and quantum teleportation. Both are inherently quantum: there are no classical protocols which behave in the same way. Both involve two parties who wish to perform some communication task between them. In descriptions of such communication protocols (especially in cryptography), it is very common to name the two parties ‘Alice’ and ‘Bob’, for convenience. We will follow this tradition. We will repeatedly refer to communication channels. A quantum communication channel refers to a communication line (e.g. a fiberoptic cable), which can carry qubits between two remote locations. A classical communication channel is one which can carry classical bits (but not qubits).1 The protocols (like many in quantum communication) require that Alice and Bob initially share an entangled pair of qubits in the Bell state The above Bell state is sometimes referred to as an EPR pair. Such a state would have to be created ahead of time, when the qubits are in a lab together and can be made to interact in a way which will give rise to the entanglement between them. After the state is created, Alice and Bob each take one of the two qubits away with them. Alternatively, a third party could create the EPR pair and give one particle to Alice and the other to Bob. If they are careful not to let them interact with the environment, or any other quantum system, Alice and Bob’s joint state will remain entangled. This entanglement becomes a resource which Alice and Bob can use to achieve protocols such as the following. Suppose Alice wishes to send Bob two classical bits of information. Superdense coding is a way of achieving this task over a quantum channel, requiring only that Alice send one qubit to Bob. Alice and Bob must initially share the Bell state Suppose Alice is in possession of the first qubit and Bob the second qubit.
In this chapter, we discuss several information measures that are important for quantifying the amount of information and correlations that are present in quantum systems. The first fundamental measure that we introduce is the von Neumann entropy (or simply quantum entropy ). It is the quantum generalization of the Shannon entropy, but it captures both classical and quantum uncertainty in a quantum state.1 The quantum entropy gives meaning to the notion of an information qubit . This notion is different from that of the physical qubit, which is the description of a quantum state of an electron or a photon. The information qubit is the fundamental quantum informational unit of measure, determining how much quantum information is present in a quantum system. The initial definitions here are analogous to the classical definitions of entropy, but we soon discover a radical departure from the intuitive classical notions from the previous chapter: the conditional quantum entropy can be negative for certain quantum states. In the classical world, this negativity simply does not occur, but it takes on a special meaning in quantum information theory. Pure quantum states that are entangled have stronger-than-classical correlations and are examples of states that have negative conditional entropy. The negative of the conditional quantum entropy is so important in quantum information theory that we even have a special name for it: the coherent information. We discover that the coherent information obeys a quantum data-processing inequality, placing it on a firm footing as a particular informational measure of quantum correlations. We then define several other quantum information measures, such as quantum mutual information, that bear similar definitions as in the classical world, but with Shannon entropies replaced with quantum entropies. This replacement may seem to make quantum entropy somewhat trivial on the surface, but a simple calculation reveals that a maximally entangled state on two qubits registers two bits of quantum mutual information (recall that the largest the mutual information can be in the classical world is one bit for the case of two maximally correlated bits). We then discuss several entropy inequalities that play an important role in quantum information processing: the monotonicity of quantum relative entropy, strong subadditivity, the quantum data-processing inequalities, and continuity of quantum entropy.