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arXiv:quant-ph/9603014 · Physical Review A

General fidelity limit for quantum channels

Howard Barnum, Christopher A. Fuchs, Richard Jozsa, Benjamin W. Schumacher

Published Dec 1, 1996• 83 citations
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Abstract

We derive a general limit on the fidelity of a quantum channel conveying an ensemble of pure states. Unlike previous results, this limit applies to arbitrary coding and decoding schemes. This establishes in full generality the quantum noiseless coding theorem, formerly obtained only for the special case of unitary decoding schemes. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.54.4707

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We derive a general limit on the fidelity of a quantum channel conveying an ensemble of pure states. Unlike previous results, this limit applies to arbitrary coding and decoding schemes. This establishes in full generality the quantum noiseless coding theorem, formerly obtained only for the special case of unitary decoding schemes. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
We consider the transmission of classical information over a quantum channel. The channel is defined by an ``alphabet'' of quantum states, e.g., certain photon polarizations, together with a specified set of probabilities with which these states must be sent. If the receiver is restricted to making separate measurements on the received ``letter'' states, then the Kholevo theorem implies that the amount of information transmitted per letter cannot be greater than the von Neumann entropy H of the letter ensemble. In fact the actual amount of transmitted information will usually be significantly less than H. We show, however, that if the sender uses a block coding scheme consisting of a choice of code words that respects the a priori probabilities of the letter states, and the receiver distinguishes whole words rather than individual letters, then the information transmitted per letter can be made arbitrarily close to H and never exceeds H. This provides a precise information-theoretic interpretation of von Neumann entropy in quantum mechanics. We apply this result to ``superdense'' coding, and we consider its extension to noisy channels. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
A theorem is proven for quantum information theory that is analogous to the noiseless coding theorem of classical information theory. In the quantum result, the von Neumann entropy S of the density operator describing an ensemble of pure quantum signal states is equal to the number of spin-1/2 systems (``quantum bits'' or ``qubits'') necessary to represent the signal faithfully. The theorem holds whether or not the signal states are orthogonal. Related results are also presented about the fidelity of quantum coding and about representing entangled quantum states.
While the ultimate limits on the rate of quantum communication over noisy channels are well-established, very few efficient coding schemes achieving these limits are known. This contrasts sharply with transmitting classical data over classical channels, where polar codes and low-density parity-check codes both efficiently achieve the classical capacity of any noisy channel. In this work we construct an efficient entanglement generation scheme which achieves the coherent information for a broad class of channels. For degradable channels in the class, which includes truncated versions of the pure loss Bosonic channel, the resulting scheme achieves the quantum capacity. The construction makes use of polar codes for two kinds of classical-input, quantum-output (CQ) channels: those with commuting outputs and those whose outputs are heralded mixtures of pure states. The former case is amenable to decoding by classical polar decoding algorithms, the latter by the belief propagation with quantum messages (BPQM) algorithm. To our knowledge, this construction is the first explicit and efficiently decodable protocol that achieves the energy-constrained quantum capacity of the pure-loss Bosonic channel.
The information spectrum approach gives general formulae for optimal rates of various information theoretic protocols, under minimal assumptions on the nature of the sources, channels and entanglement resources involved. This paper culminates in the derivation of the dense coding capacity for a noiseless quantum channel, assisted by arbitrary shared entanglement, using this approach. We also review the currently known coding theorems, and their converses, for protocols such as data compression for arbitrary quantum sources and transmission of classical information through arbitrary quantum channels. In addition, we derive the optimal rate of data compression for a mixed source
We consider the problem of compression of the quantum information carried by ensemble of mixed states. We prove that for arbitrary coding schemes the least number of quantum bits (qubits) per message needed to convey the signal states asymptotically faithfully is bounded from below by the Holevo function $S(\ensuremath{\varrho})\ensuremath{-}{\ensuremath{\sum}}_{i}{p}_{i}S({\ensuremath{\varrho}}_{i})$. We also show that a compression protocol can be composed with another one, provided that the latter offers perfect transmission. Such a compound protocol is applied to the case of binary source. It is conjectured to reach the obtained bound. Finally, we point out that in the case of mixed signal states there could be a difference between the maximal compression rates at the coding schemes that are ``blind'' to the signal and the ones that assume the knowledge about the identities of the signal states.
For the discrete memoryless quantum channel, we show the equivalence of two different notions of quantum channel capacity: that which uses the entanglement fidelity as its criterion for success in transmission, and that which uses the minimum fidelity of pure states in a subspace of the input Hilbert space as its criterion. As a corollary, any source with entropy rate less than the capacity may be transmitted with high entanglement fidelity. We also show that a restricted class of encodings is sufficient to transmit any quantum source which may be transmitted on a given channel. This enables us to simplify a known upper bound for the channel capacity. It also enables us to show that the availability of an auxiliary classical channel from encoder to decoder does not increase the quantum capacity.