Dual to the usual noisy channel coding problem, where a noisy (classical or quantum) channel is used to simulate a noiseless one, reverse Shannon theorems concern the use of noiseless channels to simulate noisy ones, and more generally the use of one noisy channel to simulate another. For channels of nonzero capacity, this simulation is always possible, but for it to be efficient, auxiliary resources of the proper kind and amount are generally required. In the classical case, shared randomness between sender and receiver is a sufficient auxiliary resource, regardless of the nature of the source, but in the quantum case, the requisite auxiliary resources for efficient simulation depend on both the channel being simulated, and the source from which the channel inputs are coming. For tensor power sources (the quantum generalization of classical memoryless sources), entanglement in the form of standard ebits (maximally entangled pairs of qubits) is sufficient, but for general sources, which may be arbitrarily correlated or entangled across channel inputs, additional resources, such as entanglement-embezzling states or backward communication, are generally needed. Combining existing and new results, we establish the amounts of communication and auxiliary resources needed in both the classical and quantum cases, the tradeoffs among them, and the loss of simulation efficiency when auxiliary resources are absent or insufficient. In particular, we find a new single-letter expression for the excess forward communication cost of coherent feedback simulations of quantum channels (i.e., simulations in which the sender retains what would escape into the environment in an ordinary simulation), on nontensor-power sources in the presence of unlimited ebits but no other auxiliary resource. Our results on tensor power sources establish a strong converse to the entanglement-assisted capacity theorem.

We develop the theory of entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting (EAQEC) codes, a generalization of the stabilizer formalism to the setting in which the sender and receiver have access to preshared entanglement. Conventional stabilizer codes are equivalent to self-orthogonal symplectic codes. In contrast, EAQEC codes do not require self-orthogonality, which greatly simplifies their construction. We show how any classical binary or quaternary block code can be made into an EAQEC code. We provide a table of best known EAQEC codes with code length up to 10. With the self-orthogonality constraint removed, we see that the distance of an EAQEC code can be better than any standard quantum error-correcting code with the same fixed net yield. In a quantum computation setting, EAQEC codes give rise to catalytic quantum codes, which assume a subset of the qubits are noiseless. We also give an alternative construction of EAQEC codes by making classical entanglement-assisted codes coherent.

We consider quantum channels with one sender and two receivers, used in several different ways for the simultaneous transmission of independent messages. We begin by extending the technique of superposition coding to quantum channels with a classical input to give a general achievable region. We also give outer bounds to the capacity regions for various special cases from the classical literature and prove that superposition coding is optimal for a class of channels. We then consider extensions of superposition coding for channels with a quantum input, where some of the messages transmitted are quantum instead of classical, in the sense that the parties establish bipartite or tripartite GHZ entanglement. We conclude by using state merging to give achievable rates for establishing bipartite entanglement between different pair of parties with the assistance of free classical communication.

We study and solve the problem of classical channel simulation with quantum side information at the receiver. This is a generalization of both the classical reverse Shannon theorem, and the classical-quantum Slepian-Wolf problem. The optimal noiseless communication rate is found to be reduced from the mutual information between the channel input and output by the Holevo information between the channel output and the quantum side information. Our main theorem has two important corollaries. The first is a quantum generalization of the Wyner-Ziv problem: rate-distortion theory with quantum side information. The second is an alternative proof of the tradeoff between classical communication and common randomness distilled from a quantum state. The fully quantum generalization of the problem considered isquantumstateredistribution. Here the sender and receiver share a mixed quantum state and the sender wants to transfer part of her state to the receiver using entanglement and quantum communication. We present outer and inner bounds on the achievable rate pairs.

Consider many instances of an arbitrary quadripartite pure state of four quantum systems ABCD. Alice holds the AC part of each state, Bob holds B, while R represents all other parties correlated with ABC . Alice is required to redistribute the C systems to Bob while asymptotically preserving the overall purity. We prove that this is possible using Q qubits of communication and E ebits of shared entanglement between Alice and Bob, provided that Q ges 1/2I(C; D|B) and Q + E ges H(C|B), proving the optimality of the Luo-Devetak outer bound. The optimal qubit rate provides the first known operational interpretation of quantum conditional mutual information. We also show how our protocol leads to a fully operational proof of strong subaddivity and uncover a general organizing principle, in analogy to thermodynamics, that underlies the optimal rates.

Quantum Shannon theory is loosely defined as a collection of coding theorems, such as classical and quantum source compression, noisy channel coding theorems, entanglement distillation, etc., which characterize asymptotic properties of quantum and classical channels and states. In this paper, we advocate a unified approach to an important class of problems in quantum Shannon theory, consisting of those that are bipartite, unidirectional, and memoryless.

We find a regularized formula for the entanglement-assisted (EA) capacity region for quantum multiple-access channels (QMAC). We illustrate the capacity region calculation with the example of the collective phase-flip channel which admits a single-letter characterization. On the way, we provide a first-principles proof of the EA coding theorem based on a packing argument. We observe that the Holevo-Schumacher-Westmoreland theorem may be obtained from a modification of our EA protocol. We remark on the existence of a family hierarchy of protocols for multiparty scenarios with a single receiver, in analogy to the two-party case. In this way, we relate several previous results regarding QMACs.

We consider quantum channels with two senders and one receiver. For an arbitrary such channel, we give multiletter characterizations of two different two-dimensional capacity regions. The first region comprises the rates at which it is possible for one sender to send classical information, while the other sends quantum information. The second region consists of the rates at which each sender can send quantum information. For each region, we give an example of a channel for which the corresponding region has a single-letter description. One of our examples relies on a new result proved here, perhaps of independent interest, stating that the coherent information over any degradable channel is concave in the input density operator. We conclude with connections to other work and a discussion on generalizations where each user simultaneously sends classical and quantum information.

Entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes (EAQECCs) make use of pre-existing entanglement between the sender and receiver to boost the rate of transmission. It is possible to construct an EAQECC from any classical linear code, unlike standard QECCs which can only be constructed from dual-containing codes. Operator quantum error-correcting codes (OQECCs) allow certain errors to be corrected (or prevented) passively, reducing the complexity of the correction procedure. We combine these two extensions of standard quantum error correction into a unified entanglement- assisted quantum error correction formalism. This new scheme, which we call entanglement-assisted operator quantum error correction (EAOQEC), is the most general and powerful quantum error-correcting technique known, retaining the advantages of both entanglement-assistance and passive correction. We present the formalism, show the considerable freedom in constructing EAOQECCs from classical codes, and demonstrate the construction with examples.

Recently Horodecki et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 100402 (2003)] introduced an important quantum information processing paradigm in which two parties sharing many copies of the same bipartite quantum state distill local pure states by means of local unitary operations assisted by a one-way (two-way) completely dephasing channel. Local pure states are a valuable resource from a thermodynamical point of view since they allow thermal energy to be converted into work by local quantum heat engines. The work deficit was defined as the decrease in the work extractable from the joint system due to this process of localization, and was proposed as a measure of the quantumness of correlations. We give a simple information theoretical characterization of the one-way work deficit, which turns out to be complementary to a previously known operational measure of classical correlations, the one-way distillable common randomness

We consider quantum channels with two senders and one receiver. For an arbitrary such channel, we give multi-letter characterizations of two different two-dimensional capacity regions. The first region characterizes the rates at which it is possible for one sender to send classical information while the other sends quantum information. The second region gives the rates at which each sender can send quantum information. We give an example of a channel for which each region has a single-letter description, concluding with a characterization of the rates at which each user can simultaneously send classical and quantum information

A formula for the capacity of a quantum channel for transmitting private classical information is derived. This is shown to be equal to the capacity of the channel for generating a secret key, and neither capacity is enhanced by forward public classical communication. Motivated by the work of Schumacher and Westmoreland on quantum privacy and quantum coherence, parallels between private classical information and quantum information are exploited to obtain an expression for the capacity of a quantum channel for generating pure bipartite entanglement. The latter implies a new proof of the quantum channel coding theorem and a simple proof of the converse. The coherent information plays a role in all of the above mentioned capacities

This paper describes the family of quantum protocols. The basic protocols are naturally organized into mutually dual hierarchies. A noiseless qubit channel, noiseless classical bit channel and pure ebit (EPR pair) reflect their classical-quantum and dynamic-static nature. In addition to teleportation (TP) and super-dense coding (SD), third noiseless resource inequality (RI), "entanglement distribution" (ED) are implemented through the qubit channel. Proving the existence of protocols implementing the parent RIs relies on making the existing children protocols coherent and using the technique of coherent communication.

The problem of converting noisy quantum correlations between two parties into noiseless classical ones using a limited amount of one-way classical communication is addressed. A single-letter formula for the optimal tradeoff between the extracted common randomness and classical communication rate is obtained for the special case of classical-quantum correlations. The resulting curve is intimately related to the quantum compression with classical side information tradeoff curve Q/sup */(R) of Hayden, Jozsa, and Winter. For a general initial state, we obtain a similar result, with a single-letter formula, when we impose a tensor product restriction on the measurements performed by the sender; without this restriction, the tradeoff is given by the regularization of this function. Of particular interest is a quantity we call "distillable common randomness" of a state: the maximum overhead of the common randomness over the one-way classical communication if the latter is unbounded. It is an operational measure of (total) correlation in a quantum state. For classical-quantum correlations it is given by the Holevo mutual information of its associated ensemble; for pure states it is the entropy of entanglement. In general, it is given by an optimization problem over measurements and regularization; for the case of separable states we show that this can be single-letterized.

We formulate quantum rate-distortion theory in the most general setting where classical side information is included in the tradeoff. Using a natural distortion measure based on entanglement fidelity and specializing to the case of an unrestricted classical side channel, we find the exact quantum rate-distortion function for a source of isotropic qubits. An upper bound we believe to be exact is found in the case of biased sources. We establish that in this scenario optimal rate-distortion codes produce no entropy exchange with the environment of any individual qubit.