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arXiv:quant-ph/0204038 · Journal of Mathematical Physics

Trading quantum for classical resources in quantum data compression

Patrick M. Hayden, Richard Jozsa, Andreas Winter

Published Sep 1, 2002• 42 citations

Abstract

We study the visible compression of a source E={|φi〉,pi} of pure quantum signal states or, more formally, the minimal resources per signal required to represent arbitrarily long strings of signals with arbitrarily high fidelity, when the compressor is given the identity of the input state sequence as classical information. According to the quantum source coding theorem, the optimal quantum rate is the von Neumann entropy S(E) qubits per signal. We develop a refinement of this theorem in order to analyze the situation in which the states are coded into classical and quantum bits that are quantified separately. This leads to a trade-off curve Q*(R), where Q*(R) qubits per signal is the optimal quantum rate for a given classical rate of R bits per signal. Our main result is an explicit characterization of this trade-off function by a simple formula in terms of only single-signal, perfect fidelity encodings of the source. We give a thorough discussion of many further mathematical properties of our formula, including an analysis of its behavior for group covariant sources and a generalization to sources with continuously parametrized states. We also show that our result leads to a number of corollaries characterizing the trade-off between information gain and state disturbance for quantum sources. In addition, we indicate how our techniques also provide a solution to the so-called remote state preparation problem. Finally, we develop a probability-free version of our main result which may be interpreted as an answer to the question: “How many classical bits does a qubit cost?” This theorem provides a type of dual to Holevo’s theorem, insofar as the latter characterizes the cost of coding classical bits into qubits.

DOI: 10.1063/1.1497184

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We consider the most general finite-dimensional quantum mechanical information source, which is given by a quantum system$A$that is correlated with a reference system$R$. The task is to compress$A$in such a way as to reproduce the joint source state$\rho ^{AR}$at the decoder with asymptotically high fidelity. This includes Schumacher’s original quantum source coding problem of a pure state ensemble and that of a single pure entangled state, as well as general mixed state ensembles. Here, we determine the optimal compression rate (in qubits per source system) in terms of the Koashi-Imoto decomposition of the source into a classical, a quantum, and a redundant part. The same decomposition yields the optimal rate in the presence of unlimited entanglement between compressor and decoder, and indeed the full region of feasible qubit-ebit rate pairs.

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We study the visible compression of a source E={|φi〉,pi} of pure quantum signal states or, more formally, the minimal resources per signal required to represent arbitrarily long strings of signals with arbitrarily high fidelity, when the compressor is given the identity of the input state sequence as classical information. According to the quantum source coding theorem, the optimal quantum rate is the von Neumann entropy S(E) qubits per signal. We develop a refinement of this theorem in order to analyze the situation in which the states are coded into classical and quantum bits that are quantified separately. This leads to a trade-off curve Q*(R), where Q*(R) qubits per signal is the optimal quantum rate for a given classical rate of R bits per signal. Our main result is an explicit characterization of this trade-off function by a simple formula in terms of only single-signal, perfect fidelity encodings of the source. We give a thorough discussion of many further mathematical properties of our formula, including an analysis of its behavior for group covariant sources and a generalization to sources with continuously parametrized states. We also show that our result leads to a number of corollaries characterizing the trade-off between information gain and state disturbance for quantum sources. In addition, we indicate how our techniques also provide a solution to the so-called remote state preparation problem. Finally, we develop a probability-free version of our main result which may be interpreted as an answer to the question: “How many classical bits does a qubit cost?” This theorem provides a type of dual to Holevo’s theorem, insofar as the latter characterizes the cost of coding classical bits into qubits.

Consider a source of pure quantum states with density matrix ρ and von Neumann entropy S . It is known that the quantum information of the source may be faithfully compressed to 5 qubits/signal (asymptotically for long sequences) and that this limit is optimal if we demand high fidelity for long strings of signals. The usual method for achieving this compression, based on the typical subspace of the source, requires knowledge of the density matrix. We describe a new “universal” compression scheme which does not even require knowledge of ρ. More precisely, suppose that the source is known to have von Neumann entropy less than some given bound S 0 but is otherwise completely unspecified. Our method will faithfully compress the quantum information of any such source to S 0 qubits/signal. It is known that S is always less than or equal to the Shannon entropy H of the prior distribution of the source. According to Shannon’s theorem, H provides the limit for compression of classical signals, so one may ask the question: what is the physical origin of the extra compression available in the quantum case compared to the classical case (where the prior probabilities are the same)? One may suggest that this effect is a consequence of possible non-orthogonality of signal states. However we demonstrate that it is possible to make each pair of signal states of a source more parallel (keeping the prior probabilities the same) while increasing the von Neumann entropy. This casts doubt on the conventional wisdom that overlap of quantum states is a measure of their (non-)distinguishability. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Consider a source ϵ of pure quantum states with von Neumann entropy S. By the quantum source coding theorem, arbitrarily long strings of signals may be encoded asymptotically into S qubits per signal (the Schumacher limit) in such a way that entire strings may be recovered with arbitrarily high fidelity. Suppose that classical storage is free while quantum storage is expensive and suppose that the states of ϵ do not fall into two or more orthogonal subspaces. We show that if ϵ can be compressed with arbitrarily high fidelity into A qubits per signal plus any amount of auxiliary classical storage, then A must still be at least as large as the Schumacher limit S of ϵ. Thus no part of the quantum information content of ϵ can be faithfully replaced by classical information. If the states do fall into orthogonal subspaces, then A may be less than S, but only by an amount not exceeding the amount of classical information specifying the subspace for a signal from the source.

After K. Bostro/spl uml/m and T. Felbinger observed that lossless quantum data compression does not exist unless decoders know the lengths of codewords, they introduced a classical noiseless channel to inform the decoder of a quantum source about the lengths of codewords. In this paper we analyze their codes and present: 1) a sufficient and necessary condition for the existence of such codes for given lists of lengths of codes; 2) a characterization of the optimal compression rate for their codes. However our main contribution is a more efficient way to use the classical channel. We propose a more general coding scheme. It turned out that the optimal compression can always be achieved by a code obtained by this scheme. A von Neumann entropy lower bound to rates of our codes and a necessary and sufficient condition to achieve the bound are obtained. The gap between this lower bound and the compression rates is also well analyzed. For a special family of quantum sources we provide a sharper lower bound in terms of Shannon entropy. Finally, we propose some problems for further research.

We consider the most general (finite-dimensional) quantum mechanical information source, which is given by a quantum system A that is correlated with a reference system R. The task is to compress A in such a way as to reproduce the joint source state ρARat the decoder with asymptotically high fidelity. This includes Schumacher's original quantum source coding problem of a pure state ensemble and that of a single pure entangled state, as well as general mixed state ensembles. Here, we determine the optimal compression rate (in qubits per source system) in terms of the Koashi-Imoto decomposition of the source into a classical, a quantum, and a redundant part. The same decomposition yields the optimal rate in the presence of unlimited entanglement between compressor and decoder, and indeed the full region of feasible qubitebit rate pairs. Full version at arXiv:1912.08506 [1].

Free classical communication can yield an unbounded single-shot saving in quantum compression, even though it leaves the asymptotic rate of an i.i.d. source unchanged. At every fixed error in

(0,1)

, we exhibit sources whose unassisted compression cost is arbitrarily large, yet a single qubit suffices with classical communication and no preshared entanglement. We establish this separation by determining the exact optimal source fidelity for compression through an

m

-dimensional noiseless quantum channel, with and without free classical communication, while preserving correlations with an inaccessible reference. Without classical assistance, the optimal fidelity is exactly the Ky Fan norm

\|ρ\|_{(m)}

, the sum of the

m

largest eigenvalues of the source state. With classical assistance, we obtain an explicit spectral threshold formula and a protocol attaining it. Classical communication strictly improves fidelity whenever

m

is smaller than the source rank. The corresponding compression costs are two smoothed versions of the log-rank entropy, also called max-entropy: trace-distance smoothing under local operations and quadratic smoothing under LOCC. For i.i.d. copies of a fixed source with positive entropy variance, however, the two costs have identical first-, second-, and third-order asymptotic terms. For nonlattice spectra, we determine the constant-order advantage: classical communication saves

\log_2(e)-1

bits per block asymptotically, and the ratio of assisted to unassisted minimum communication dimensions converges to

2/e

.

We consider the most general finite-dimensional quantum mechanical information source, which is given by a quantum system

A

that is correlated with a reference system

R

. The task is to compress

A

in such a way as to reproduce the joint source state

\rho ^{AR}

at the decoder with asymptotically high fidelity. This includes Schumacher’s original quantum source coding problem of a pure state ensemble and that of a single pure entangled state, as well as general mixed state ensembles. Here, we determine the optimal compression rate (in qubits per source system) in terms of the Koashi-Imoto decomposition of the source into a classical, a quantum, and a redundant part. The same decomposition yields the optimal rate in the presence of unlimited entanglement between compressor and decoder, and indeed the full region of feasible qubit-ebit rate pairs.