Two important classes of quantum channels, namely, the Werner-Holevo and the Landau-Streater channels, are known to be related only in three dimensions, i.e., when acting on qutrits. In this work, the definition of the Landau-Streater channel is extended in such a way that it retains its equivalence to the Werner-Holevo channel in all dimensions. This channel is then modified to be representable as a model of noise acting on qudits. We then investigate properties of the resulting noisy channel and determine the conditions under which it cannot be the result of a Markovian evolution. Furthermore, we investigate its different capacities for transmitting classical and quantum information with or without entanglement. In particular, while the pure (or high-noise) Landau-Streater or the Werner-Holevo channel is entanglement breaking and hence has zero capacity, by finding a lower bound for the quantum capacity, we show that when the level of noise is lower than a critical value the quantum capacity will be nonzero. Surprisingly, this value turns out to be approximately equal to 0.4 in all dimensions. Finally, we show that, in even dimensions, this channel has a decomposition in terms of unitary operations. This is in contrast with the three-dimensional, case where it has been proved that such a decomposition is impossible, even in terms of other quantum maps.
Two important classes of quantum channels, namely, the Werner-Holevo and the Landau-Streater channels, are known to be related only in three dimensions, i.e., when acting on qutrits. In this work, the definition of the Landau-Streater channel is extended in such a way that it retains its equivalence to the Werner-Holevo channel in all dimensions. This channel is then modified to be representable as a model of noise acting on qudits. We then investigate properties of the resulting noisy channel and determine the conditions under which it cannot be the result of a Markovian evolution. Furthermore, we investigate its different capacities for transmitting classical and quantum information with or without entanglement. In particular, while the pure (or high-noise) Landau-Streater or the Werner-Holevo channel is entanglement breaking and hence has zero capacity, by finding a lower bound for the quantum capacity, we show that when the level of noise is lower than a critical value the quantum capacity will be nonzero. Surprisingly, this value turns out to be approximately equal to 0.4 in all dimensions. Finally, we show that, in even dimensions, this channel has a decomposition in terms of unitary operations. This is in contrast with the three-dimensional, case where it has been proved that such a decomposition is impossible, even in terms of other quantum maps.
Two important classes of quantum channels, namly the Werner-Holevo and the Landau-Streater channels are known to be related only in three dimensions, i.e. when acting on qutrits. In this work, definition of the Landau-Streater channel is extended in such a way which retains its equivalence to the Werner-Holevo channel in all dimensions. This channel is then modified to be representable as a model of noise acting on qudits. We then investigate propeties of the resulting noisy channel and determine the conditions under which it cannot be the result of a Markovian evolution. Furthermore, we investigate its different capacities for transmitting classical and quantum information with or without entanglement. In particular, while the pure (or high noise) Landau-Streater or the Werner-Holevo channel is entanglement breaking and hence has zero capacity, by finding a lower bound for the quantum capacity, we show that when the level of noise is lower than a critical value the quantum capacity will be non-zero. Surprizingly this value turns out to be approximately equal to 0.4 in all dimensions. Finally we show that, in even dimension, this channel has a decomposition in terms of unitary operations. This is in contrast with the three dimensional case where it has been proved that such a decomposition is impossible, even in terms of other quantum maps.
Interest in the Werner-Holevo channel ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}}_{1}(\ensuremath{\rho})=\frac{1}{2}[\mathrm{tr}(\ensuremath{\rho})I\ensuremath{-}{\ensuremath{\rho}}^{T}]$ has been mainly due to its abstract mathematical properties. We show that in three dimensions and with a slight modification, this channel can be realized as the rotation of qutrit states in random directions by random angles. Our modification takes the form ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}}_{x}(\ensuremath{\rho})=(1\ensuremath{-}x)\ensuremath{\rho}+x{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}}_{1}(\ensuremath{\rho})$. Therefore, and in view of the potential use of qutrits in quantum processing tasks and their realization in many different platforms, the modified Werner-Holevo channel can be used as a very simple and realistic noise model, in the same way that the depolarizing channel is for qubits. We will make a detailed study of this channel and derive its various properties. In particular, we will use the recently proposed flag extension and other techniques to derive analytical expressions and bounds for the different capacities of this channel. The role of symmetry is revealed in these derivations. We also rigorously prove that the channel ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}}_{x}$ is antidegradable and hence has zero quantum capacity, in the region $\frac{4}{7}\ensuremath{\le}x\ensuremath{\le}1.$
Abstract Determining whether a noisy quantum channel can be used to reliably transmit quantum information is a challenging problem in quantum information theory. This is because it requires computation of the channel’s coherent information for an unbounded number of copies of the channel. In this paper, we devise an elementary perturbative technique to solve this problem in a wide variety of circumstances. Our analysis reveals that a channel’s ability to transmit information is intimately connected to the relative sizes of its input, output, and environment spaces. We exploit this link to develop easy tests which can be used to detect positivity of quantum channel capacities simply by comparing the channels’ input, output, and environment dimensions. Several noteworthy examples, such as the depolarizing and transpose-depolarizing channels (including the Werner-Holevo channel), dephasing channels, generalized Pauli channels, multi-level amplitude damping channels, and (conjugate) diagonal unitary covariant channels, serve to aptly exhibit the utility of our method. Notably, in all these examples, the coherent information of a single copy of the channel turns out to be positive.
Degradable quantum channels are among the only channels whose quantum and private classical capacities are known. As such, determining the structure of these channels is a pressing open question in quantum information theory. We give a comprehensive review of what is currently known about the structure of degradable quantum channels, including a number of new results as well as alternate proofs of some known results. In the case of qubits, we provide a complete characterization of all degradable channels with two dimensional output, give a new proof that a qubit channel with two Kraus operators is either degradable or anti-degradable, and present a complete description of anti-degradable unital qubit channels with a new proof. For higher output dimensions we explore the relationship between the output and environment dimensions (dB and dE, respectively) of degradable channels. For several broad classes of channels we show that they can be modeled with an environment that is “small” in the sense of ΦC. Such channels include all those with qubit or qutrit output, those that map some pure state to an output with full rank, and all those which can be represented using simultaneously diagonal Kraus operators, even in a non-orthogonal basis. Perhaps surprisingly, we also present examples of degradable channels with “large” environments, in the sense that the minimal dimension dE>dB. Indeed, one can have dE>14dB2. These examples can also be used to give a negative answer to the question of whether additivity of the coherent information is helpful for establishing additivity for the Holevo capacity of a pair of channels. In the case of channels with diagonal Kraus operators, we describe the subclasses that are complements of entanglement breaking channels. We also obtain a number of results for channels in the convex hull of conjugations with generalized Pauli matrices. However, a number of open questions remain about these channels and the more general case of random unitary channels.
Transmitting quantum information across quantum channels is an important task. However quantum information is delicate, and is easily corrupted. We address the task of protecting quantum information from an information theoretic perspective -- we encode some message qudits into a quantum code, send the encoded quantum information across the noisy quantum channel, then recover the message qudits by decoding. In this dissertation, we discuss the coding problem from several perspectives.} \n \nThe noisy quantum channel is one of the central aspects of the quantum coding problem, and hence quantifying the noisy quantum channel from the physical model is an important problem. \nWe work with an explicit physical model -- a pair of initially decoupled quantum harmonic oscillators interacting with a spring-like coupling, where the bath oscillator is initially in a thermal-like state. In particular, we treat the completely positive and trace preserving map on the system as a quantum channel, and study the truncation of the channel by truncating its Kraus set. We thereby derive the matrix elements of the Choi-Jamiolkowski operator of the corresponding truncated channel, which are truncated transition amplitudes. Finally, we give a computable approximation for these truncated transition amplitudes with explicit error bounds, and perform a case study of the oscillators in the off-resonant and weakly-coupled regime numerically. \n \nIn the context of truncated noisy channels, we revisit the notion of approximate error correction of finite dimension codes. We derive a computationally simple lower bound on the worst case entanglement fidelity of a quantum code, when the truncated recovery map of Leung et. al. is rescaled. As an application, we apply our bound to construct a family of multi-error correcting amplitude damping codes that are permutation-invariant. This demonstrates an explicit example where the specific structure of the noisy channel allows code design out of the stabilizer formalism via purely algebraic means. \n \nWe study lower bounds on the quantum capacity of adversarial channels, where we restrict the selection of quantum codes to the set of concatenated quantum codes. \nThe adversarial channel is a quantum channel where an adversary corrupts a fixed fraction of qudits sent across a quantum channel in the most malicious way possible. The best known rates of communicating over adversarial channels are given by the quantum Gilbert-Varshamov (GV) bound, that is known to be attainable with random quantum codes. We generalize the classical result of Thommesen to the quantum case, thereby demonstrating the existence of concatenated quantum codes that can asymptotically attain the quantum GV bound. The outer codes are quantum generalized Reed-Solomon codes, and the inner codes are random independently chosen stabilizer codes, where the rates of the inner and outer codes lie in a specified feasible region. \n \nWe next study upper bounds on the quantum capacity of some low dimension quantum channels. \nThe quantum capacity of a quantum channel is the maximum rate at which quantum information can be transmitted reliably across it, given arbitrarily many uses of it. While it is known that random quantum codes can be used to attain the quantum capacity, the quantum capacity of many classes of channels is undetermined, even for channels of low input and output dimension. For example, depolarizing channels are \n important quantum channels, but do not have tight numerical bounds. \nWe obtain upper bounds on the quantum capacity of some unital and non-unital channels \n -- two-qubit Pauli channels, two-qubit depolarizing channels, two-qubit locally symmetric channels, \n shifted qubit depolarizing channels, and shifted two-qubit Pauli channels -- \n using the coherent information of some degradable channels. We use the notion \n of twirling quantum channels, and Smith and Smolin's method of constructing \n degradable extensions of quantum channels extensively. The degradable channels we \n introduce, study and use are two-qubit amplitude damping channels. Exploiting the \n notion of covariant quantum channels, we give sufficient conditions for the quantum \n capacity of a degradable channel to be the optimal value of a concave program with \n linear constraints, and show that our two-qubit degradable amplitude damping channels have this property.
Understanding the limits of quantum communication is a central problem in quantum information theory. Structural properties of quantum channels provide tools for analyzing these limits. In particular, approximate degradability links quantum-capacity bounds to the accuracy with which a channel's environment can be reconstructed from its output. We study this reconstruction problem for noisy Landau-Streater channels across finite-spin representations. For spin j and noise probability p, we construct an explicit degrading map with diamond-norm error at most [2+8/(j(j+1))]p2≤(38/3)p2 on the common interval 0≤p≤1/8. A lower bound establishes quadratic order for this construction at each fixed spin. Floating-point semidefinite optimization places its error within 2.48% of the numerical optimum on the sampled grid for four spins. Covariance and conditional-entropy concavity yield explicit two-sided quantum-capacity bounds for this family with a spin-uniform remainder. Building on the low-noise Pauli cancellation strategy, we formulate a sufficient condition based on a common scalar adjoint action on fixed, possibly nonunitary noise Kraus operators. The resulting reconstruction-error bound is uniform in system dimension and Kraus count. The criterion applies to irreducible SU(N) generator channels and noisy Werner-Holevo channels, with the SU(3) adjoint representation providing an example outside the mixed-unitary class.