When does a difference in information become a way to communicate? Imagine two quantum channels as competing routes through noise. One might preserve a distinction that the other loses. That difference is interesting on its own; the question here is whether it can be turned into something operational: a channel that can carry private or quantum information at a positive rate. This paper presents a construction intended to make that step. Starting from a failure of complete quantum-channel information order, it constructs a channel claimed to have strictly positive ordinary private and quantum capacity. “Complete” matters because the comparison allows an input to be correlated with a finite quantum reference: information may be visible in the joint system even when it is hidden from the channel output alone. The construction accounts for the resources it uses, including transmission of the reference and uses of an activation helper. Its conclusion concerns strict positivity: a rate greater than zero, however small. It does not claim a uniform positive gap or fixed-error capacity inapproximability. The paper also develops reductions connecting the capacity questions to one-way distillable entanglement and secret key. The state constructions are designed to retain any prescribed lower bound on two-way distillation. On this basis, the manuscript claims exact-zero undecidability classifications for finite rational-complex memoryless channels and corresponding classifications for the one-way quantities. The information-order equivalences and undecidability premises used in these conclusions are developed in the companion paper, Complete information orders of quantum channels: equivalence and undecidability. A further introduction and citation details are available on the manuscript page.
When does a difference in information become a way to communicate? Imagine two quantum channels as competing routes through noise. One might preserve a distinction that the other loses. That difference is interesting on its own; the question here is whether it can be turned into something operational: a channel that can carry private or quantum information at a positive rate. This paper presents a construction intended to make that step. Starting from a failure of complete quantum-channel information order, it constructs a channel claimed to have strictly positive ordinary private and quantum capacity. “Complete” matters because the comparison allows an input to be correlated with a finite quantum reference: information may be visible in the joint system even when it is hidden from the channel output alone. The construction accounts for the resources it uses, including transmission of the reference and uses of an activation helper. Its conclusion concerns strict positivity: a rate greater than zero, however small. It does not claim a uniform positive gap or fixed-error capacity inapproximability. The paper also develops reductions connecting the capacity questions to one-way distillable entanglement and secret key. The state constructions are designed to retain any prescribed lower bound on two-way distillation. On this basis, the manuscript claims exact-zero undecidability classifications for finite rational-complex memoryless channels and corresponding classifications for the one-way quantities. The information-order equivalences and undecidability premises used in these conclusions are developed in the companion paper, Complete information orders of quantum channels: equivalence and undecidability. A further introduction and citation details are available on the manuscript page.
Recent examples have shown that zero private capacity need not imply antidegradability and that two channels with zero private capacity can nevertheless transmit private information together. Existing entropic channel orders compare what a receiver and its environment can learn and thereby bound capacities. We connect these orders to the recent constructions through binary estimation, whose minimum mean-square error is governed by measured χ2 divergence. A new integral representation shows how measured χ2 on a qubit extension recovers quantum χ2. It lets us pass from complete measured-χ2 ordering to complete quantum-χ2, relative-entropy, and less-noisy ordering. Zhu and Wang used a signed lift to show that their qutrit channel has zero private capacity. We show that Hermitian-smoothed measured-χ2 ordering characterizes when such lifts exist, even with a quantum reference. Environmental dominance in binary estimation at every blocklength yields a finite-code reliability--secrecy bound. These results explain why complete comparison prevents activation with antidegradable helpers whereas regularized comparison alone does not. Building on that qutrit example, we establish this stability for a range of noisy Werner--Holevo channels, determine sharp private-capacity and antidegradability thresholds, and compute exact complementary capacities in a nondegradable range. By contrast, we extend Pauli half-erasure activation to all 1/2≤p<1 and establish the same range for a new four-level family. Reference-assisted measured-χ2 witnesses show why these activating constructions lack complete comparison.
How do you decide which quantum channel keeps more information? There is more than one way to ask. You can compare how well two states remain distinguishable, how much information an ensemble retains, or how sensitively an output responds to a small change. These are different mathematical questions. This paper asks when they give the same ordering of quantum channels. The comparison is complete: an input may share correlations with a separate, finite quantum reference, and the reference can be as large as needed. That extra system makes the question richer than looking at the channel output alone. For finite-dimensional channels, the manuscript claims an equivalence among complete comparisons expressed through relative entropy, Holevo information, BKM and SLD Fisher information, and measured chi-squared divergence. It also studies the complementary channel—the part of a Stinespring description that goes to the environment—and claims that the information order reverses under genuine complementation. The second part asks whether these comparisons can be decided by an algorithm. The paper claims coRE-completeness for a class of strictly positive rational-complex measurements, and that no computable bound on reference size suffices for the stated SLD comparison. It also claims fixed-additive-accuracy inapproximability for a bounded entropy defect. These are claims about precisely specified mathematical decision problems, not a claim that every practical channel comparison is impossible. The companion paper, From complete channel order to capacity and one-way distillation, explores consequences for communication and distillation using the order results developed here. See the manuscript page for a further introduction and citation details.
Secret-key distillation from quantum states and channels is a central task of interest in quantum information theory, as it facilitates private communication over a quantum network. Here, we study the task of secret-key distillation from bipartite states and point-to-point quantum channels using local operations and one-way classical communication (one-way LOCC). We employ the resource theory of unextendible entanglement to study the transformation of a bipartite state under one-way LOCC, and we obtain several efficiently computable upper bounds on the number of secret bits that can be distilled from a bipartite state using one-way LOCC channels; these findings apply not only in the one-shot setting but also in some restricted asymptotic settings. We extend our formalism to private communication over a quantum channel assisted by forward classical communication. We obtain efficiently computable upper bounds on the one-shot forward-assisted private capacity of a channel, thus addressing a question in the theory of quantum-secured communication that has been open for some time now. Our formalism also provides upper bounds on the rate of private communication when using a large number of channels in such a way that the error in the transmitted private data decreases exponentially with the number of channel uses. Moreover, our bounds can be computed using semidefinite programs, thus providing a computationally feasible method to understand the limits of private communication over a quantum network.
Quantum communication relies on the existence of high quality quantum channels to exchange information. In practice, however, all communication links are affected by noise from the environment. Here we investigate the ability of quantum channels to perform quantum communication tasks by restricting the participants to use only local operations and one-way classical communication (one-way LOCC) along with the available quantum channel. In particular, a channel can be used to distill a highly entangled state between two parties, which further enables quantum or private communication. In this work, we invoke the framework of superchannels to study the distillation of a resourceful quantum state, such as a maximally entangled state or a private state, using multiple instances of a point-to-point quantum channel. We use the idea ofk-extendibility to obtain a semidefinite relaxation of the set of one-way LOCC superchannels and define a class of entanglement measures for quantum channels that decrease monotonically under such superchannels; therefore these measures, dubbed collectively the “unextendible entanglement of a channel”, yield upper bounds on several communication-theoretic quantities of interest in the regimes of resource distillation and zero error.We then generalize the formalism ofk-extendibility to bipartite superchannels, thus obtaining functions that are monotone under two-extendible superchannels. This allows us to analyze probabilistic distillation of ebits or secret key bits from a bipartite state when using a resourceful quantum channel. Moreover, we propose semidefinite programs to evaluate several of these quantities, providing a computationally feasible method of comparison between quantum channels for resource distillation.
Private communication over a noisy quantum channel requires reliable transmission to the receiver and secrecy from the environment. Whether two channels with zero private capacity can jointly enable private communication is a longstanding open problem in quantum information theory. Here we resolve this problem by exhibiting a four-level channel and a qubit erasure channel with half erasure probability, each with zero private capacity, whose joint use achieves more than 0.0001903 private bits per product use. The encoding gives the receiver a linear information gain with at most quadratic environmental leakage, enabling privacy through a fixed joint measurement and classical coding. This superactivation, impossible for independent classical memoryless wiretap channels, shows that a channel's private capacity alone does not determine its value for secure communication. The initial activation example was identified through interactions with large language models, and the result has been formalized in Lean 4.
Estimating the information transmission capability of a quantum channel remains one of the fundamental problems in quantum information processing. In contrast to classical channels, the information-carrying capability of quantum channels is contextual. One of the most significant manifestations of this is the superadditivity of the channel capacity: the capacity of two quantum channels used together can be larger than the sum of the individual capacities. Here, we present a one-parameter family of channels for which, as the parameter increases, its one-way quantum and private capacities increase while its two-way capacities decrease. We also exhibit a one-parameter family of states with analogous behavior with respect to the one- and two-way distillable entanglement and secret key. Our constructions demonstrate that noise is context dependent in quantum communication. Published by the American Physical Society 2024