In a recent Brief Report, L. Lee, D. Ahn, and S. W. Hwang [Phys. Rev. A 66, 024304 (2002)] have claimed that using pairwise entangled qubits gives rise to an exponentially more efficient dense coding when two parties are involved than using maximally entangled qubits shared among N parties. Here we show that their claim is not true.
Recently, Yan and Gao [Phys. Rev. A 72, 012304 (2005)] presented a quantum secret sharing protocol which allows a secret message to be shared between two groups of parties (m parties in group 1 and n parties in group 2). Their protocol is claimed to be secure that, except with the cooperation of the entire group 1 or group 2, no subgroup of either group 1 or group 2 can extract the secret message. However, this study points out that the mth party (the last party to process the quantum state) of group 1 can maliciously replace the secret message with an arbitrary message without the detection of the other parties.
We consider a situation in which two parties, Alice and Bob, share a 3-qubit system coupled in an initial maximally entangled, GHZ state. By manipulating locally two of the qubits, Alice can prepare any one of the eight 3-qubit GHZ states. Thus the sending of Alice's two qubits to Bob, entails 3 bits of classical information which can be recovered by Bob by means of a measurement distinguishing the eight (orthonormal) GHZ states. This contrasts with the 2-qubit case, in which Alice can prepare any of the four Bell states by acting locally only on one of the qubits.
Ideal dense coding protocols allow one to use prior maximal entanglement to send two bits of classical information by the physical transfer of a single encoded qubit. We investigate the case when the prior entanglement is not maximal and the initial state of the entangled pair of qubits being used for the dense coding is a mixed state. We find upper and lower bounds on the capability to do dense coding in terms of the various measures of entanglement. Our results can also be reinterpreted as giving bounds on purification procedures in terms of dense coding capacities.
Under two-party deterministic dense coding, Alice communicates (perfectly distinguishable) messages to Bob via a qudit from a pair of entangled qudits in pure state $|\ensuremath{\Psi}\ensuremath{\rangle}$. If $|\ensuremath{\Psi}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ represents a maximally entangled state (i.e., each of its Schmidt coefficients is 1/d), then Alice can convey to Bob one of d2 distinct messages. If $|\ensuremath{\Psi}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ is not maximally entangled, then Ji et al. [Phys. Rev. A 73, 034307 (2006)] have shown that under the original deterministic dense-coding protocol, in which messages are encoded by unitary operations performed on Alice's qudit, it is impossible to encode ${d}^{2}\ensuremath{-}1$ messages. Encoding ${d}^{2}\ensuremath{-}2$ messages is possible; see, for example, the numerical studies by Mozes et al. [Phys. Rev. A 71, 012311 (2005)]. Answering a question raised by Wu et al. [Phys. Rev. A 73, 042311 (2006)], we show that when $|\ensuremath{\Psi}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ is not maximally entangled, the communications limit of ${d}^{2}\ensuremath{-}2$ messages persists even when the requirement that Alice encode by unitary operations on her qudit is weakened to allow encoding by more general quantum operators. We then describe a dense-coding protocol that can overcome this limitation with high probability, assuming the largest Schmidt coefficient of $|\ensuremath{\Psi}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ is sufficiently close to 1/d. In this protocol, ${d}^{2}\ensuremath{-}2$ of the messages are encoded via unitary operations on Alice's qudit, and the final $({d}^{2}\ensuremath{-}1)$-th message is encoded via a non-trace-preserving quantum operation.