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arXiv:quant-ph/0509126 · Markov Processes And Related Fields

Properties of Conjugate Channels with Applications to Additivity and Multiplicativity

Christopher King, Keiji Matsumoto, Michael Nathanson, Mary Beth Ruskai

Published Sep 19, 2005• 115 citations
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Abstract

Quantum channels can be described via a unitary coupling of system and environment, followed by a trace over the environment state space. Taking the trace instead over the system state space produces a different mapping which we call the conjugate channel. We explore the properties of conjugate channels and describe several different methods of construction. In general, conjugate channels map M_d to M_d' with d < d', and different constructions may differ by conjugation with a partial isometry. We show that a channel and its conjugate have the same minimal output entropy and maximal output p-norm. It then follows that the additivity and multiplicativity conjectures for these measures of optimal output purity hold for a product of channels if and only if they also hold for the product of their conjugates. This allows us to reduce these conjectures to the special case of maps taking M_d to M_d' with a minimal representation of dimension at most d. We find explicit expressions for the conjugates for a number of well-known examples, including entanglement-breaking channels, unital qubit channels, the depolarizing channel, and a subclass of random unitary channels. For the entanglement-breaking channels, channels this yields a new class of channels for which additivity and multiplicativity of optimal output purity can be established. For random unitary channels using the generalized Pauli matrices, we obtain a new formulation of the multiplicativity conjecture. The conjugate of the completely noisy channel plays a special role and suggests a mechanism for using noise to transmit information.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0509126

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Quantum channels can be described via a unitary coupling of system and environment, followed by a trace over the environment state space. Taking the trace instead over the system state space produces a different mapping which we call the conjugate channel. We explore the properties of conjugate channels and describe several different methods of construction. In general, conjugate channels map M_d to M_d' with d < d', and different constructions may differ by conjugation with a partial isometry. We show that a channel and its conjugate have the same minimal output entropy and maximal output p-norm. It then follows that the additivity and multiplicativity conjectures for these measures of optimal output purity hold for a product of channels if and only if they also hold for the product of their conjugates. This allows us to reduce these conjectures to the special case of maps taking M_d to M_d' with a minimal representation of dimension at most d. We find explicit expressions for the conjugates for a number of well-known examples, including entanglement-breaking channels, unital qubit channels, the depolarizing channel, and a subclass of random unitary channels. For the entanglement-breaking channels, channels this yields a new class of channels for which additivity and multiplicativity of optimal output purity can be established. For random unitary channels using the generalized Pauli matrices, we obtain a new formulation of the multiplicativity conjecture. The conjugate of the completely noisy channel plays a special role and suggests a mechanism for using noise to transmit information.
We explore complementarity between output and environment of a quantum channel (or, more generally, CP map), making an observation that the output purity characteristics for complementary CP maps coincide. Hence, validity of the mutiplicativity/additivity conjecture for a class of CP maps implies its validity for complementary maps. The class of CP maps complementary to entanglement-breaking ones is described and is shown to contain diagonal CP maps as a proper subclass, resulting in new class of CP maps (channels) for which the multiplicativity/additivity holds. Covariant and Gaussian channels are discussed briefly in this context.
We explore the complementarity between output and environment of a quantum channel (or, more generally, completely positive (CP) map), making an observation that the output purity characteristics for complementary CP maps coincide. Hence, the validity of the mutiplicativity/additivity conjecture for a class of CP maps implies its validity for complementary maps. The class of CP maps complementary to entanglement‐breaking ones is described and is shown to contain diagonal CP maps as a proper subclass, resulting in a new class of CP maps (channels) for which the multiplicativity/additivity holds. Covariant and Gaussian channels are discussed briefly in this context.
A class of problems in quantum information theory, having an elementary formulation but still resisting solution, concerns the additivity properties of various quantities characterizing quantum channels, notably the “classical capacity”, and the “maximal output purity”. All known results, including extensive numerical work, are consistent with the conjecture that these quantities are indeed additive (resp. multiplicative) with respect to tensor products of channels. A proof of this conjecture would have important consequences in quantum information theory. In particular, according to this conjecture, the classical capacity or the maximal purity of outputs cannot be increased by using entangled inputs of the channel. In this paper we state the additivity/multiplicativity problems, give some relations between them, and prove some new partial results, which also support the conjecture. 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.
We investigate decoherence induced by a quantum channel in terms of minimal output entropy and of map entropy. The latter is the von Neumann entropy of the Jamiolkowski state of the channel. Both quantities admit q-Renyi versions. We prove additivity of the map entropy for all q. For the case q = 2, we show that the depolarizing channel has the smallest map entropy among all channels with a given minimal output Renyi entropy of order two. This allows us to characterize pairs of channels such that the output entropy of their tensor product acting on a maximally entangled input state is larger than the sum of the minimal output entropies of the individual channels. We conjecture that for any channel Φ1 acting on a finite dimensional system there exists a class of channels Φ2 sufficiently close to a unitary map such that additivity of minimal output entropy for Ψ1 x Ψ2 holds.
One of the central problems of quantum information theory [1] is the additivity conjecture for the channel capacity of quantum communication channels [2]–[4]. Recently Shor showed [5] that the validity of this conjecture for all quantum channels was equivalent to a whole series of (super)additivity properties for other important characteristics such as minimal output entropy and entanglementof formation. The present paper introduces the new property of strong additivity (additivity for channels with input constraints) with several equivalent formulations, establishes that it is satisfied for some nontrivial classes of channels and notes that the validity of the additivity conjecture for all channels implies strong additivity. Let H, H′ be finite-dimensional unitary spaces. By a quantum channel we mean a completely positive trace-preserving linear map Φ: B(H) → B(H′), where B(H) is the algebra of all operators on H. In particular, Φ generates an affine map of the convex set S(H) of states (density operators) on the space H into the set S(H′) of states on H′ [1]. The quantum analogue of Shannon’s theorem, established in [4], gives the following expression for the classical channel capacity:
A class of problems in quantum information theory, having an elementary formulation but still resisting solution, concerns the additivity properties of various quantities characterizing quantum channels, notably the "classical capacity", and the "maximal output purity". All known results, including extensive numerical work, are consistent with the conjecture that these quantities are indeed additive (resp. multiplicative) with respect to tensor products of channels. A proof of this conjecture would have important consequences in quantum information theory. In particular, according to this conjecture, the classical capacity or the maximal purity of outputs cannot be increased by using entangled inputs of the channel. In this paper we state the additivity/multiplicativity problems, give some relations between them, and prove some new partial results, which also support the conjecture.