Additivity of the Holevo capacity is proved for product channels, under the condition that one of the channels is in a certain class of unital qubit channels, with the other completely arbitrary. This qubit class includes the depolarizing channel. As a byproduct this proves that the Holevo bound is the ultimate information capacity of such qubit channels (assuming no prior entanglement between sender and receiver). Additivity of minimal entropy and multiplicativity of p-norms are also proved under the same assumptions.
Classical capacity of unital qubit channels is well known, whereas that of nonunital qubit channels is not. We find lower and upper bounds on classical capacity of nonunital qubit channels by using a recently developed decomposition technique relating nonunital and unital positive qubit maps.
We study the entanglement-breaking (EB) space, such that the entanglement of formation (EOF) of a bipartite quantum state is additive when its range is an EB subspace. We systematically construct the EB spaces in the Hilbert space $\bbC^m\otimes\bbC^3$, and the $2$-dimensional EB space in $\bbC^2\otimes\bbC^n$. We characterize the expression of two-qubit states of rank two with nonadditive EOF, if they exist. We further apply our results to construct EB spaces of an arbitrarily given dimensions. We show that the example in [PRL 89,027901(2002)] is a special case of our results. We further work…
We consider a scenario where a party, say, Alice prepares a pure two-qubit (either maximally entangled or non-maximally entangled) state and sends one half of this state to another distant party, say, Bob through a qubit (either unital or non-unital) channel. Finally, the shared state is used as a teleportation channel. In this scenario, we focus on characterizing the set of qubit channels with respect to the final state's efficacy as a resource of quantum teleportation (QT) in terms of maximal average fidelity and fidelity deviation (fluctuation in fidelity values over the input states). Impo…
We address the problem of existence of completely positive trace preserving (CPTP) maps between two sets of density matrices. We refine the result of Alberti and Uhlmann and derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a unital channel between two pairs of qubit states which ultimately boils down to three simple inequalities.
We show that any unital qubit channel can be implemented by letting the input system interact unitarily with a $4$-dimensional environment in the maximally mixed state and then tracing out the environment. We also provide an example where the dimension of such an environment has to be at least $3$.
We study the problem of optimal preparation of a bipartite entangled state, which remains entangled the longest time under action of local qubit noises. We show that for unital noises such a state is always maximally entangled, whereas for nonunital noises, it is not. We develop a decomposition technique relating nonunital and unital qubit channels, based on which we find the explicit form of the ultimately robust state for general local noises. We illustrate our findings by amplitude damping processes at finite temperature, for which the ultimately robust state remains entangled up to two tim…
When can noiseless quantum information be sent across noisy quantum devices? And at what maximum rate? These questions lie at the heart of quantum technology, but remain unanswered because of non-additivity -- a fundamental synergy which allows quantum devices (aka quantum channels) to send more information than expected. Previously, non-additivity was known to occur in very noisy channels with coherent information much smaller than that of a perfect channel; but, our work shows non-additivity in a simple low-noise channel. Our results extend even further. We prove a general theorem concerning…
The classical Second Law of Thermodynamics demands that an isolated system evolves with a non-diminishing entropy. This holds as well in quantum mechanics if the evolution of the energy-isolated system can be described by a unital quantum channel. At the same time, the entropy of a system evolving via a non-unital channel can, in principle, decrease. Here, we analyze the behavior of the entropy in the context of the H-theorem. As exemplary phenomena, we discuss the action of a Maxwell demon (MD) operating a qubit and the processes of heating and cooling in a two-qubit system. We further discus…
Quantum queue-channels arise naturally in the context of buffering in quantum networks, wherein the noise suffered by the quantum states depends on the time spent waiting in the buffer. It has been shown that the upper-bound on the classical capacity of an additive queue-channel has a simple expression, and is achievable for the erasure and depolarizing channels [IEEE JSAIT, 1(2):432-444]. In this paper, we characterise the classical capacity for the class of unital qubit queue-channels, and show that a simple product (non-entangled) decoding strategy is capacity-achieving. As an intermediate …
We consider an arbitrary qubit channel depending on a single parameter, which is to be estimated by a physical process. Using the quantum Fisher information per channel invocation to quantify the estimation accuracy, we consider various estimation protocols when the available initial states are mixed with very low purity. We compare a protocol using a single channel invocation on one out of $n$ qubits prepared in a particular correlated input state to the optimal protocol using uncorrelated input states, with the same initial state purity. We show that, to lowest order in initial-state purity,…
We show that a configuration of four birefringent crystals and wave-plates can emulate almost any arbitrary unital channel for polarization qubits encoded in single photons, where the channel settings are controlled by the wave-plate angles. The scheme is applied to a single spatial mode and its operation is independent of the wavelength and the fine temporal properties of the input light. We implemented the scheme and demonstrated its operation by applying a dephasing environment to classical and quantum single-photon states with different temporal properties. The applied process was characte…
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…
We study quantum channels that are close to another channel with weakly additive Holevo information and derive upper bounds on their classical capacity. Examples of channels with weakly additive Holevo information are entanglement-breaking channels, unital qubit channels, and Hadamard channels. Related to the method of approximate degradability, we define approximation parameters for each class above that measure how close an arbitrary channel is to satisfying the respective property. This gives us upper bounds on the classical capacity in terms of functions of the approximation parameters, as…
Incompatibility and nonlocality are not only of foundational interest but also act as important resources for quantum information theory. In the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) scenario, the incompatibility of a pair of observables is known to be equivalent to Bell nonlocality. Here, we investigate these notions in the context of qubit channels. The Bell-CHSH inequality has a greater perspective--compared to any genuine tripartite nonlocality scenario--while determining the interplay between nonlocality breaking qubit channels and incompatibility breaking qubit channels. In the Bell-CHSH sce…
We investigate the coherence of quantum channels using the Choi-Jamiołkowski isomorphism. The relation between the coherence and the purity of the channel respects a duality relation. It characterizes the allowed values of coherence when the channel has certain purity. This duality has been depicted via the Coherence-Purity (Co-Pu) diagrams. In particular, we study the quantum coherence of the unital and non-unital qubit channels and find out the allowed region of coherence for a fixed purity. We also study coherence of different incoherent channels, namely, incoherent operation (IO), strictly…
Machine learning techniques are increasingly being used in fundamental research to solve various challenging problems. Here we explore one such technique to address an important problem in quantum communication scenario. While transferring quantum information through a noisy quantum channel, the utility of the channel is characterized by its quantum capacity. Quantum channels, however, display an intriguing property called super-additivity of coherent information. This makes the calculation of quantum capacity a hard computational problem involving optimization over an exponentially increasing…
Closed-Form Arbitrary-Gap Rényi Nonadditivity Above Any Positive Order via Direct Products of Free Groups and High-Girth Graphs
Thrust of Artificial Intelligence, Information Hub,The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州）信息枢纽人工智能领域）；Quantum Science Center of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area（粤港澳大湾区量子科学中心）
We adopt the perspective of similarity equivalence, in gate set tomography called the gauge, to analyze various properties of quantum operations belonging to a semigroup, $Φ= e^{{\cal L}t}$,and therefore given through the Lindblad operator. We first observe that the non unital part of the channel decouples from the time evolution. Focusing on unital operations we restrict our attention to the single-qubit case, showing that the semigroup embedded inside the tetrahedron of Pauli channels is bounded by the surface composed of product probability vectors and includes the identity map together wit…
The action of qubit channels on projective measurements on a qubit state is used to establish an equivalence between channels and properties of generalized measurements characterized by bias and sharpness parameters. This can be interpreted as shifting the description of measurement dynamics from the Schrodinger to the Heisenberg picture. In particular, unital quantum channels are shown to induce unbiased measurements. The Markovian channels are found to be equivalent to measurements for which sharpness is a monotonically decreasing function of time. These results are illustrated by considerin…
