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arXiv:quant-ph/9901035 · Physical Review Letters

Cost of Exactly Simulating Quantum Entanglement with Classical Communication

Gilles Brassard A, Richard Cleve, Alain Tapp

Published Aug 30, 1999• 245 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We investigate the amount of communication that must augment classical local hidden variable models in order to simulate the behavior of entangled quantum systems. We consider the scenario where a bipartite measurement is given from a set of possibilities and the goal is to obtain exactly the same correlations that arise when the actual quantum system is measured. We show that, in the case of a single pair of qubits in a Bell state, a constant number of bits of communication is always sufficient---regardless of the number of measurements under consideration. We also show that, in the case of a system of $n$ Bell states, a constant times ${2}^{n}$ bits of communication is necessary.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.83.1874

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We investigate the amount of communication that must augment classical local hidden variable models in order to simulate the behavior of entangled quantum systems. We consider the scenario where a bipartite measurement is given from a set of possibilities and the goal is to obtain exactly the same correlations that arise when the actual quantum system is measured. We show that, in the case of a single pair of qubits in a Bell state, a constant number of bits of communication is always sufficient---regardless of the number of measurements under consideration. We also show that, in the case of a system of nnn Bell states, a constant times 2n{2}^{n}2n bits of communication is necessary.
Recent work has extended Bell's theorem by quantifying the amount of communication required to simulate entangled quantum systems with classical information. The general scenario is that a bipartite measurement is given from a set of possibilities and the goal is to find a classical scheme that reproduces exactly the correlations that arise when an actual quantum system is measured. Previous results have shown that, using local hidden variables, a finite amount of communication suffices to simulate the correlations for a Bell state. We extend this in a number of ways. First, we show that, when the communication is merely required to be finite on average, Bell states can be simulated without any local hidden variables. More generally, we show that arbitrary positive operator valued measurements on systems of n Bell states can be simulated with O(n2n){O(n2}^{n})O(n2n) bits of communication on average (again, without local hidden variables). On the other hand, when the communication is required to be absolutely bounded, we show that a finite number of bits of local hidden variables is insufficient to simulate a Bell state. This latter result is based on an analysis of the nondeterministic communication complexity of the NOT-EQUAL function, which is constant in the quantum model and logarithmic in the classical model.
Abstract According to Bell’s theorem, certain entangled states cannot be simulated classically using local hidden variables (LHV). Suppose that we can augment LHV by some amount of classical communication. The question then arises as to how many bits are needed to simulate entangled states? There is very strong evidence that a single bit of communication is powerful enough to simulate projective measurements on any two-qubit entangled state. However, the problem of simulating measurements on higher-dimensional systems remains largely unexplored. In this study, we present Bell-like scenarios, even with three inputs per party, in which bipartite correlations resulting from measurements on higher-dimensional states cannot be simulated with a single bit of communication. We consider the case where the communication direction is fixed and the case where it is bidirectional. To this end, we introduce constructions based on parallel repetition of pseudo-telepathy games and an original algorithm based on branch-and-bound technique to compute the one-bit classical bound. Two copies of emblematic Bell expressions, such as the Magic square pseudo-telepathy game, prove to be particularly powerful, requiring a 16 × 16 state to beat the bidirectional one-bit classical bound, and look a promising candidate for implementation on an optical platform.
Nonlocality is at the heart of quantum information processing. In this paper we investigate the minimum amount of classical communication required to simulate a nonlocal quantum measurement. We derive general upper bounds, which in turn translate to systematic classical simulations of quantum communication protocols.As a concrete application, we prove that any quantum communication protocol with shared entanglement for computing a Boolean function can be simulated by a classical protocol whose cost does not depend on the amount of the shared entanglement. This implies that if the cost of communication is a constant, quantum and classical protocols, with shared entanglement and shared coins, respectively, compute the same class of functions.Furthermore, we describe a new class of efficient quantum communication protocols based on fast quantum algorithms. While some of them have efficient classical simulations by our method, others appear to be good candidates for separating quantum v.s. classical protocols, and quantum protocols with v.s. without shared entanglement.Yet another application is in the context of simulating quantum correlations using local hidden variable models augmented with classical communications. We give a constant cost, approximate simulation of quantum correlations when the number of correlated variables is a constant, while the dimension of the entanglement and the number of possible measurements can be arbitrary.Our upper bounds are expressed in terms of some tensor norms on the measurement operator. Those norms capture the nonlocality of bipartite operators in their own way and may be of independent interest and further applications.
Suppose Alice and Bob share a maximally entangled state of any finite dimension and each perform two-outcome measurements on the respective part of the state. It is known, due to the recent result of Regev and Toner, that if a classical model is augmented with two bits of communication, then all the quantum correlations arising from these measurements can be reproduced. Here, we show that two bits of communication are in fact necessary for the perfect simulation. In particular, we prove that a pair of maximally entangled four-dimensional quantum systems cannot be simulated by a classical model augmented by only one bit of communication.
A long-standing open question is to characterize the classical communication cost of simulating the correlations arising from measurements on finite-dimensional quantum systems. We consider this question in the prepare-and-measure scenario. First we construct a classical simulation model involving a finite average number of bits of one-way communication that simulates exactly the correlations arising from arbitrary ddd-dimensional quantum states and arbitrary measurements. Second, we show that no classical simulation protocol involving a finite average message dimension can exist for d≥4d\geq 4d≥4, hence strengthening a recent result of de Gois, Santos and Vieira. Our first result relies on a more general simulation theorem which can be applied to certain continuous variable (i.e. infinite-dimensional) quantum systems, and even beyond quantum theory, e.g. to generalized probabilistic theories. In particular, we show that multimode Gaussian states of bounded average energy and general Gaussian measurements admit an exact classical simulation with a finite expected number of bits. Overall, our results show that the classical simulation cost of quantum communication is essentially as high as it could be.