This work shows an approach to reduce the dimensionality of matrix representations of quantum channels. It is achieved by finding a base of the cone of positive semidefinite matrices which represent quantum channels. Next, this is implemented in the Julia programming language as a part of the QuantumInformation.jl package.
For a given quantum channel we consider two optimal sets of states, related to the Holevo capacity and to the minimal output entropy of this channel. Some properties of these sets as well as the necessary and sufficient condition for their coincidence are obtained. The relations between additivity properties for two quantum channels and the structure of the optimal sets for tensor product of these channels are considered. It turns out that these additivity properties are connected with the special hereditary property of the optimal sets for tensor product channel. We explore the structural pro…
We explore the task of optimal quantum channel identification, and in particular the estimation of a general one parameter quantum process. We derive new characterizations of optimality and apply the results to several examples including the qubit depolarizing channel and the harmonic oscillator damping channel. We also discuss the geometry of the problem and illustrate the usefulness of using entanglement in process estimation.
We consider the problem of discriminating qubit states that are sent over a quantum channel and derive a necessary and sufficient condition for an optimal measurement to be preserved by the channel. We apply the result to the characterization of optimal measurement preserving (OMP) channels for a given qubit ensemble, e.g., a set of two states or a set of multiple qubit states with equal a priori probabilities. Conversely, we also characterize qubit ensembles for which a given channel is OMP, such as unitary and depolarization channels. Finally, we show how the sets of OMP channels for a given…
We investigate the question of optimal input ensembles for memory channels and construct a rather large class of Pauli channels with correlated noise which can be studied analytically with regard to the entanglement of their optimal input ensembles. In a more detailed study of a subclass of these channels, the complete phase diagram of the two-qubit channel, which shows three distinct phases is obtained. While increasing the correlation generally changes the optimal state from separable to maximally entangled states, this is done via an intermediate region where both separable and maximally en…
We find optimality conditions for testers in discrimination of quantum channels. These conditions are obtained using semidefinite programming and are similar to optimality conditions for POVMs obtained by Holevo for ensembles of quantum states. We get a simple condition for existence of an optimal tester with any given input state with maximal Schmidt rank, in particular with a maximally entangled input state and we show the pitfalls of using input states with not maximal Schmidt rank. In case when maximally entangled state is not the optimal input state an error estimate is obtained. The resu…
The optimal measurement configuration, i.e., the optimal input quantum state and measurement in the form of a POVM with two elements, is investigated in this paper for qubit and generalized Pauli channels. The channel directions are defined as the contracting directions of the channel with an arbitrary fixed basis of Pauli- matrices. In the qubit Pauli channel case with known channel directions it is shown that the optimal configuration that maximizes the Fisher information of the estimated parameters consists of three von Neumann measurements together with pure input states directed to the ap…
We propose a method of optimally controlling state transfer through a noisy quantum channel (spin-chain). This process is treated as qubit state-transfer through a fermionic bath. We show that dynamical modulation of the boundary-qubits levels suffices to ensure fast and high-fidelity state transfer. This is achievable by dynamically optimizing the transmission spectrum of the channel. The resulting optimal control is robust against both static and fluctuating noise.
Maximally entangled states--a resource for quantum information processing--can only be shared through noiseless quantum channels, whereas in practice channels are noisy. Here we ask: Given a noisy quantum channel, what is the maximum attainable purity (measured by singlet fraction) of shared entanglement for single channel use and local trace preserving operations? We find an exact formula of the maximum singlet fraction attainable for a qubit channel and give an explicit protocol to achieve the optimal value. The protocol distinguishes between unital and nonunital channels and requires no loc…
In this work, we consider optimal state discrimination for a quantum system that interacts with an environment, i.e., states evolve under a quantum channel. We show the conditions on a quantum channel and an ensemble of states such that a measurement for optimal state discrimination is preserved. In particular, we show that when an ensemble of states with equal {\it a priori} probabilities is given, an optimal measurement can be preserved over any quantum channel by applying local operations and classical communication, that is, by manipulating the quantum states before and after the channel a…
We consider the general problem of the optimal transformation of N uses of (possibly different) unitary channels to a single use of another unitary channel in any finite dimension. We show how the optimal transformation can be fully parallelized, consisting in a preprocessing channel followed by a parallel action of all the N unitaries and a final postprocessing channel. Our techniques allow to achieve an exponential reduction in the number of the free parameters of the optimization problem making it amenable to an efficient numerical treatment. Finally, we apply our general results to find th…
We present the experimental realization of the optimal estimation protocol for a Pauli noisy channel. The method is based on the generation of 2-qubit Bell states and the introduction of quantum noise in a controlled way on one of the state subsystems. The efficiency of the optimal estimation, achieved by a Bell measurement, is shown to outperform quantum process tomography.
We study the super dense coding capacity in the presence of quantum channels with correlated noise. We investigate both the cases of unitary and non-unitary encoding. Pauli channels for arbitrary dimensions are treated explicitly. The super dense coding capacity for some special channels and resource states is derived for unitary encoding. We also provide an example of a memory channel where non-unitary encoding leads to an improvement in the super dense coding capacity.
We experimentally demonstrate a single-qubit decohering quantum channel using linear optics. We implement the channel, whose special cases include both the amplitude-damping channel and the bit-flip channel, using a single, static optical setup. Following a recent theoretical result [M. Piani et al., Phys. Rev. A, 84, 032304 (2011)], we realize the channel in an optimal way, maximizing the probability of success, i.e., the probability for the photonic qubit to remain in its encoding. Using a two-photon entangled resource, we characterize the channel using ancilla-assisted process tomography an…
We consider quantum-information division, which is characterized by a channel whose outputs have no correlation and are not completely randomized. We show that the quantum-information division is possible in a probabilistic manner by optimizing the average fidelity in the channel with $M$ outputs in both deterministic and probabilistic cases. Moreover, we show that the optimal fidelities drastically change depending on the condition imposed on the outputs (symmetric and asymmetric), which is quite in contrast to the case of imperfect cloning.
We investigate strategies for estimating a depolarizing channel for a finite dimensional system. Our analysis addresses the double optimization problem of selecting the best input probe state and the measurement strategy that minimizes the Bayes cost of a quadratic function. In the qubit case, we derive the Bayes optimal strategy for any finite number of input probe particles when bipartite entanglement can be formed in the probe particles.
We identify necessary and sufficient conditions for a quantum channel to be optimal for any convex optimization problem in which the optimization is taken over the set of all quantum channels of a fixed size. Optimality conditions for convex optimization problems over the set of all quantum measurements of a given system having a fixed number of measurement outcomes are obtained as a special case. In the case of linear objective functions for measurement optimization problems, our conditions reduce to the well-known Holevo-Yuen-Kennedy-Lax measurement optimality conditions. We illustrate how o…
We consider the problem of establishing entangled states of optimal singlet fraction and negativity between two remote parties for every use of a noisy quantum channel and trace-preserving LOCC under the assumption that the parties do not share prior correlations. We show that for a family of quantum channels in every finite dimension $d\geq3$, one-shot optimal singlet fraction and entanglement negativity are attained only with appropriate nonmaximally entangled states. We further show that the generalization of the formula that exactly computes one-shot optimal singlet fraction for qubit chan…
Due to the anisotropy of quantum lossy channels one must choose optimal bases of input states for best estimating them. In this paper, we obtain that the equal probability Schrödinger cat states are optimal for estimating a single lossy channel and they are also the optimal bases of input states for estimating composite lossy channels. On the other hand, by using the symmetric logarithmic derivative (SLD) Fisher information of output states exported from the lossy channels we obtain that if we take the equal probability Schrödinger cat states as the bases of input states the maximally entangle…
Statistical estimation and test of unknown channels have attracted interest of many researchers. In optimizing the process of inference, an important step is optimization of the input state, which in general do depend on the kind of inference (estimation or test, etc.), on the error measure, and so on. But sometimes, there is a universally optimal input state, or an input state best for all the statistical inferences and for all the risk functions. In the paper, the existence of a universally optimal state is shown for group covariant/contravariant channels, unital qubit channels and some meas…
We present a class of numerical algorithms which adapt a quantum error correction scheme to a channel model. Given an encoding and a channel model, it was previously shown that the quantum operation that maximizes the average entanglement fidelity may be calculated by a semidefinite program (SDP), which is a convex optimization. While optimal, this recovery operation is computationally difficult for long codes. Furthermore, the optimal recovery operation has no structure beyond the completely positive trace preserving (CPTP) constraint. We derive methods to generate structured channel-adapted …
The most important ability of a quantum channel is to preserve the quantum properties of transmitted quantum states. We experimentally demonstrate a continuous-variable system for efficient benchmarking of quantum channels. We probe the tested quantum channels for a wide range of experimental parameters such as amplitude, phase noise and channel lengths up to 40 km. The data is analyzed using the framework of effective entanglement. We subsequently are able to deduce an optimal point of operation for each quantum channel with respect to the rate of distributed entanglement. This procedure is a…
We construct a practical method for finding optimal Gaussian probe states for the estimation of parameters encoded by Gaussian unitary channels. This method can be used for finding all optimal probe states, rather than focusing on the performance of specific states as shown in previous studies. As an example, we apply this method to find optimal probes for the channel that combines the phase-change and squeezing channels, and for generalized two-mode squeezing and mode-mixing channels. The method enables a comprehensive study of temperature effects in Gaussian parameter estimation. It has been…
We investigate robustness of probabilistic storage and retrieval device optimized for phase gates to noise. We use noisy input composed of convex combination of unitary channel with either depolarizing or dephasing channel. We find out that the resistance to dephasing noise is higher than to depolarization. Interestingly, for the depolarisation the retrieval reduces the degree of noise. We also examine the possible realizations showing that their performance is different when the noise is present.
We addressed the question of optimality of private quantum channels. We have shown that the Shannon entropy of the classical key necessary to securely transfer the quantum information is lower bounded by the entropy exchange of the private quantum channel $\cal E$ and von Neumann entropy of the ciphertext state $\varrho^{(0)}$. Based on these bounds we have shown that decomposition of private quantum channels into orthogonal unitaries (if exists) is optimizing the entropy. For non-ancillary single qubit PQC we have derived the optimal entropy for arbitrary set of plaintexts. In particular, we …
To establish an entangled state of optimal fidelity between two distant observers when the available quantum channel is noisy, is a central problem in quantum information theory. We consider an instance of this problem for two-qubit systems when only a single use of the channel and local post-processing by trace preserving operations are allowed. We show that the optimal fidelity is obtained only when part of an appropriate non-maximally entangled state is transmitted through the channel. The entanglement of this state can be vanishingly small when the channel becomes very noisy. Moreover, in …
We address the question of a quantum memory storage of quantum dynamics. In particular, we design an optimal protocol for $N\to 1$ probabilistic storage-and-retrieval of unitary channels on $d$-dimensional quantum systems. If we may access the unknown unitary gate only $N$-times, the optimal success probability of perfect retrieval of its single use is $N/(N-1+d^2)$. The derived size of the memory system exponentially improves the known upper bound on the size of the program register needed for probabilistic programmable quantum processors. Our results are closely related to probabilistic perf…
We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the approximate correctability of a quantum code, generalizing the Knill-Laflamme conditions for exact error correction. Our measure of success of the recovery operation is the worst-case entanglement fidelity of the overall process. We show that the optimal recovery fidelity can be predicted exactly from a dual optimization problem on the environment causing the noise. We use this result to obtain an easy-to-calculate estimate of the optimal recovery fidelity as well as a way of constructing a class of near-optimal recovery channels that work …
We study the problem of transmission of classical messages through a quantum channel in several network scenarios in the one-shot setting. We consider both the entanglement assisted and unassisted cases for the point to point quantum channel, quantum multiple-access channel, quantum channel with state and the quantum broadcast channel. We show that it is possible to near-optimally characterize the amount of communication that can be transmitted in these scenarios, using the position-based decoding strategy introduced in a prior work [Anshu, Jain and Warsi, 2017]. In the process, we provide a s…
We address the problem of optimally approximating the action of a desired and unavailable quantum channel $Φ$ having at our disposal a single use of a given set of other channels $\{Ψ_i \}$. The problem is recast to look for the least distinguishable channel from $Φ$ among the convex set $\sum_i p_i Ψ_i$, and the corresponding optimal weights $\{ p_i \}$ provide the optimal convex mixing of the available channels $\{Ψ_i \}$. For single-qubit channels we study specifically the cases where the available convex set corresponds to covariant channels or to Pauli channels, and the desired target map…
The one-shot success probability of a noisy classical channel for transmitting one classical bit is the optimal probability with which the bit can be sent via a single use of the channel. Prevedel et al. (PRL 106, 110505 (2011)) recently showed that for a specific channel, this quantity can be increased if the parties using the channel share an entangled quantum state. We completely characterize the optimal entanglement-assisted protocols in terms of the radius of a set of operators associated with the channel. This characterization can be used to construct optimal entanglement-assisted protoc…
A unified framework is proposed in this paper for parameter estimation using convex optimization and experiment design applying convex maximization for Pauli channels, that can be extended to generalized Pauli channels, too. In the case of known channel directions, an affine parametrization of the Choi matrix turns the LS parameter estimation into a convex optimization problem also for the generalized Pauli channels. A simple iterative algorithm for estimating the channel directions is also given for qubit Pauli channels. The experiment design was performed by maximizing the trace of the Fishe…
We address the problem of unambiguous comparison of a pair of unknown qudit unitary channels. Using the framework of process positive operator valued measures (PPOVM) we characterize all solutions and identify the optimal ones. We prove that the entanglement is the key ingredient in designing the optimal experiment for comparison of unitary channels. Without entanglement the optimality can not be achieved. The proposed scheme is also experimentally feasible.
We propose constructive approaches for the optimization of binary classical communication over a general noisy qubit quantum channel, for both the error probability and the classical capacity functionals. After showing that the optimal measurements are always associated to orthogonal projections, we construct a parametrization of the achievable transition probabilities via the coherence vector representation. We are then able to rewrite the problem in a form that can be solved by standard, efficient numerical algorithms and provides insights on the form of the solutions.
Let $ρ_1, ρ_2$ be quantum states and $(ρ_1,ρ_2) \mapsto D(ρ_1, ρ_2)$ be a scalar function such as the trace norm, the fidelity, and the relative entropy, etc. We determine optimal bounds for $D(ρ_1, Φ(ρ_2))$ for $Φ\in \mathcal{S}$ for different class of functions $D(\cdot, \cdot)$, where $\mathcal{S}$ is the set of unitary quantum channels, the set of mixed unitary channels, the set of unital quantum channels, and the set of all quantum channels.
We show that any incoherent qubit channel could be decomposed into four incoherent Kraus operators. The proof consists in showing existence of four incoherent Kraus operators by decomposing the corresponding Choi-Jamiołkowski-Sudarshan matrix. We mention some applications of this optimal decomposition. We also show that the Kraus rank and incoherent rank are different even for qubit channel.
We investigate the problem of optimally reversing the action of an arbitrary quantum channel C which acts independently on each component of an ensemble of n identically prepared d-dimensional quantum systems. In the limit of large ensembles, we construct the optimal reversing channel R* which has to be applied at the output ensemble state, to retrieve a smaller ensemble of m systems prepared in the input state, with the highest possible rate m/n. The solution is found by mapping the problem into the optimal reversal of Gaussian channels on quantum-classical continuous variable systems, which …
We study mixed unitary quantum channels generated by irreducible projective unitary representations of finite groups. Under some assumptions on the probability distribution determining a mixture the classical capacity of the channel is found. Examples illustrating the techniques are given.
