A set of pairwise non-orthogonal quantum states cannot be perfectly discriminated, and this remains true even when one bit of classical partial information is available prior to the measurement. Contrary to the usual intuition that earlier information is at least as valuable as later information, we show that the same bit can be more useful when it arrives after the measurement. We present a framework for state discrimination in which the sender provides classical information in response to a request from the receiver, which we refer to as a query. In some cases, pairwise non-orthogonal states can be perfectly discriminated when the query is allowed to depend on the measurement outcome. We give a general method for finding the optimal strategy in this setting, which turns out to be the standard minimum-error discrimination problem for an auxiliary ensemble.
Abstract We address perfect discrimination of two separable states. When available states are restricted to separable states, we can theoretically consider a larger class of measurements than the class of measurements allowed in quantum theory. The framework composed of the class of separable states and the above extended class of measurements is a typical example of general probabilistic theories. In this framework, we give a necessary and sufficient condition to discriminate two separable pure states perfectly. In particular, we derive measurements explicitly to discriminate two separable pure states perfectly, and find that some non-orthogonal states are perfectly distinguishable. However, the above framework does not improve the capacity , namely, the maximum number of states that are simultaneously and perfectly distinguishable.
Entanglement is known to be a powerful resource that improves performance in various quantum information and computational tasks. A standard example of such a phenomenon is the possibility of perfectly discriminating all four Pauli operations in a single shot via the superdense coding protocol. While entanglement is often a powerful resource for quantum channel discrimination, this is not necessarily the case. In this work, we identify scenarios in which the maximally entangled state is a bad choice of input state and, more generally, show that excessive entanglement can reduce channel discriminability dramatically. To do so, we present an explicit pair of unitary channels which are perfectly discriminable without entanglement, but for which any strategy with maximally entangled input states is
ε-close to a blind uniform guessing strategy. To develop a systematic approach, we introduce the concepts of Maximal Entanglement Worst Case (MEWC) and Maximal Entanglement Best Case (MEBC) pairs of channels, and present conditions for a pair of channels to be MEWC or MEBC. With these conditions, we show that the optimal input states for discriminating MEWC pairs of channels are necessarily separable, and provide non-trivial examples of measurement channels for which entanglement necessarily reduces the maximum probability of discrimination.