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arXiv:quant-ph/0306017 · Physical Review Letters

Quantum Communication Complexity of Establishing a Shared Reference Frame

Terry Rudolph, Lov K. Grover

Published Nov 21, 2003• 67 citations
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Abstract

We discuss the aligning of spatial reference frames from a quantum communication complexity perspective. This enables us to analyze multiple rounds of communication and give several simple examples demonstrating tradeoffs between the number of rounds and the type of communication. Using a distributed variant of a quantum computational algorithm, we give an explicit protocol for aligning spatial axes via the exchange of spin-1/2 particles which makes no use of either exchanged entangled states, or of joint measurements. This protocol achieves a worst-case fidelity for the problem of "direction finding" that is asymptotically equivalent to the optimal average case fidelity achievable via a single forward communication of entangled states.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.91.217905

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We discuss the aligning of spatial reference frames from a quantum communication complexity perspective. This enables us to analyze multiple rounds of communication and give several simple examples demonstrating tradeoffs between the number of rounds and the type of communication. Using a distributed variant of a quantum computational algorithm, we give an explicit protocol for aligning spatial axes via the exchange of spin-1/2 particles which makes no use of either exchanged entangled states, or of joint measurements. This protocol achieves a worst-case fidelity for the problem of "direction finding" that is asymptotically equivalent to the optimal average case fidelity achievable via a single forward communication of entangled states.
We generalize a quantum communication protocol introduced by Bartlett et al. [New J. Phys. 11, 063013 (2009)], in which two parties communicating do not share a classical reference frame, to the case where changes of their reference frames form a one-dimensional noncompact Lie group. Alice sends to Bob the state ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{R}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{S}$, where ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{S}$ is the state of the system Alice wishes to communicate and ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{R}$ is the state of an ancillary system serving as a token of her reference frame. Because Bob is ignorant of the relationship between his reference frame and Alice's, he will describe the state ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{R}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{S}$ as an average over all possible reference frames. Bob measures the reference token and applies a correction to the system Alice wished to communicate conditioned on the outcome of the measurement. The recovered state ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{S}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ is decohered with respect to ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{S}$, the amount of decoherence depending on the properties of the reference token ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{R}$. We present an example of this protocol when Alice and Bob do not share a reference frame associated with the one-dimensional translation group and use the fidelity between ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{S}$ and ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{S}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ to quantify the success of the recovery operation.
Typical quantum communication schemes are such that to achieve perfect decoding the receiver must share a reference frame (RF) with the sender. Indeed, if the receiver only possesses a bounded-size quantum token of the sender's RF, then the decoding is imperfect, and we can describe this effect as a noisy quantum channel. We seek here to characterize the performance of such schemes, or equivalently, to determine the effective decoherence induced by having a bounded-size RF. We assume that the token is prepared in a special state that has particularly nice group-theoretic properties and that is near-optimal for transmitting information about the sender's frame. We present a decoding operation, which can be proven to be near-optimal in this case, and we demonstrate that there are two distinct ways of implementing it (corresponding to two distinct Kraus decompositions). In one, the receiver measures the orientation of the RF token and reorients the system appropriately. In the other, the receiver extracts the encoded information from the virtual subsystems that describe the relational degrees of freedom of the system and token. Finally, we provide explicit characterizations of these decoding schemes when the system is a single qubit and for three standard kinds of RF: a phase reference, a Cartesian frame (representing an orthogonal triad of spatial directions), and a reference direction (representing a single spatial direction).
We present a procedure that uses a multipartite quantum state to communicate a secret spatial direction when there is no shared reference frame between the preparer and the group of recipients. The procedure guarantees that the recipients can determine the direction if they perform joint measurements on the state, but fail to do so if they restrict themselves to local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We calculate the fidelity for joint measurements, give bounds on the fidelity achievable by LOCC, and prove that there is a non-vanishing gap between the two of them, even in the limit of infinitely many copies. The robustness of the procedure under particle loss is also studied. Additionally, we find bounds on the probability of discriminating by LOCC between the invariant subspaces of total angular momentum N /2 and N /2−1 in a system of N elementary spins.