This paper is concerned with quantum data compression of asymptotically many independent and identically distributed copies of ensembles of mixed quantum states. The encoder has access to a side information system. The figure of merit is per-copy or local error criterion. Rate-distortion theory studies the trade-off between the compression rate and the per-copy error. The optimal trade-off can be characterized by the rate-distortion function, which is the best rate given a certain distortion. In this paper, we derive the rate-distortion function of mixed-state compression. The rate-distortion functions in the entanglement-assisted and unassisted scenarios are in terms of a single-letter mutual information quantity and the regularized entanglement of purification, respectively. For the general setting where the consumption of both communication and entanglement are considered, we present the full qubit-entanglement rate region. Our compression scheme covers both blind and visible compression models (and other models in between) depending on the structure of the side information system.

In this paper we consider the compression of asymptotically many i.i.d. copies of ensembles of mixed quantum states where the encoder has access to a side information system. This source is equivalently defined as a classical-quantum state, namely, a quantum system correlated with a classical system playing the role of an inaccessible reference system. The figure of merit is evaluated based on per-copy or local error criterion. The rate-distortion theory aims to reveal the trade-off between the compression rate and the per-copy error. The optimal trade-off can be characterized by the rate-distortion function, which is the best rate given a certain distortion. In this paper, we analyze the rate-distortion functions of mixed-state compression. We find the rate-distortion functions in the entanglement-assisted and unassisted scenarios, in terms of a single-letter mutual information quantity and the regularized entanglement of purification, respectively.

Understanding quantum channels and the strange behavior of their capacities is a key objective of quantum information theory. Here we study a remarkably simple, low-dimensional, single-parameter family of quantum channels with exotic quantum information-theoretic features. As the simplest example from this family, we focus on a qutrit-to-qutrit channel that is intuitively obtained by hybridizing together a simple degradable channel and a completely useless qubit channel. Such hybridizing makes this channel’s capacities behave in a variety of interesting ways. For instance, the private and classical capacity of this channel coincide and can be explicitly calculated, even though the channel does not belong to any class for which the underlying information quantities are known to be additive. Moreover, the quantum capacity of the channel can be computed explicitly, given a clear and compelling conjecture is true. This “spin alignment conjecture,” which may be of independent interest, is proved in certain special cases and additional numerical evidence for its validity is provided. Finally, we generalize the qutrit channel in two ways, and the resulting channels and their capacities display similarly rich behavior. In the companion paper [1], we further show that the qutrit channel demonstrates superadditivity when transmitting quantum information jointly with a variety of assisting channels, in a manner unknown before.

A key objective of quantum information theory is to understand quantum channels and their capacities. Here we study a remarkably simple, low-dimensional, single-parameter family of quantum channels with exotic quantum information-theoretic features. We focus on the simplest example from this family, a qutrit-to-qutrit channel intuitively obtained by hybridizing together a simple degradable channel with a completely useless qubit channel. Such hybridizing makes this channel’s capacities behave in a variety of interesting ways. For instance, the private and classical capacity of this channel coincide and can be explicitly calculated, even though the channel lies outside any previous class with calculable capacities. Moreover, the quantum capacity of the channel can be computed explicitly, given a clear and compelling conjecture is true. This "spin alignment conjecture", which may be of independent interest, is proved in certain special cases and backed numerically in certain other cases. Finally, we generalize the qutrit channel; the resulting channels and their capacities display similarly rich behavior. Our companion paper [22] demonstrates superadditivity when transmitting quantum information jointly across our qutrit channel used with a variety of assisting channels, in a manner unknown before.

Inblindcompression of quantum states, a sender Alice is given a specimen of a quantum state$\rho $drawn from a known ensemble (but without knowing what$\rho $is), and she transmits sufficient quantum data to a receiver Bob so that he can decode a near perfect specimen of$\rho $. For many such states drawn iid from the ensemble, the asymptotically achievable rate is the number of qubits required to be transmitted per state. The Holevo information is a lower bound for the achievable rate, and is attained for pure state ensembles, or in the related scenario of entanglement-assistedvisiblecompression of mixed states wherein Alice knows what state is drawn. In this paper, we prove a general and robust lower bound on the achievable rate for ensembles of classical states, which holds even in the least demanding setting when Alice and Bob share free entanglement and a constant per-copy error is allowed. We apply the bound to aspecificensemble of only two states and prove a near-maximal separation (saturating the dimension bound in leading order) between the best achievable rate and the Holevo information for constant error. This also implies that the ensemble is incompressible – compression does not reduce the communication cost by much. Since the states areclassical, the observed incompressibility is not fundamentally quantum mechanical. We lower bound the difference between the achievable rate and the Holevo information in terms of quantitative limitations to clone the specimen or to distinguish the two classical states.

We consider the problem of implementing two-party interactive quantum communication over noisy channels, a necessary endeavor if we wish to fully reap quantum advantages for communication. For an arbitrary protocol with n messages, designed for a noiseless qudit channel over a poly (n ) size alphabet, our main result is a simulation method that fails with probability less than 2-Θ(nϵ)and uses a qudit channel over the same alphabet n(1 + Θ(√{ϵ} )) times, of which an ϵ fraction can be corrupted adversarially. The simulation is thus capacity achieving to leading order, and we conjecture that it is optimal up to a constant factor in the √{ϵ} term. Furthermore, the simulation is in a model that does not require pre-shared resources such as randomness or entanglement between the communicating parties. Our work improves over the best previously known quantum result where the overhead is a non-explicit large constant [Brassard et al., SICOMP'19] for low ϵ.

We consider the problem of implementing two-party interactive quantum communication over noisy channels, a necessary endeavor if we wish to fully reap quantum advantages for communication. For an arbitrary protocol with n messages, designed for noiseless qudit channels (where d is arbitrary), our main result is a simulation method that fails with probability less than 2−Θ (nє) and uses a qudit channel n (1 + Θ (√є)) times, of which an є fraction can be corrupted adversarially. The simulation is thus capacity achieving to leading order, and we conjecture that it is optimal up to a constant factor in the √є term. Furthermore, the simulation is in a model that does not require pre-shared resources such as randomness or entanglement between the communicating parties. Perhaps surprisingly, this outperforms the best known overhead of 1 + O(√є loglog1/є) in the corresponding classical model, which is also conjectured to be optimal [Haeupler, FOCS’14]. Our work also improves over the best previously known quantum result where the overhead is a non-explicit large constant [Brassard et al., FOCS’14] for low є.

We determine both the quantum and the private capacities of low-noise quantum channels to leading orders in the channel's distance to the perfect channel. It has been an open problem for more than 20 years to determine the capacities of some of these low-noise channels such as the depolarizing channel. We also show that both capacities are equal to the single-letter coherent information of the channel, again to leading orders. We thus find that, in the low noise regime, super-additivity and degenerate codes have negligible benefit for the quantum capacity, and shielding does not improve the private capacity beyond the quantum capacity, in stark contrast to the situation when noisier channels are considered.

We derive one-shot upper bounds for quantum noisy channel codes. We do so by regarding a channel code as a bipartite operation with an encoder belonging to the sender and a decoder belonging to the receiver, and imposing constraints on the bipartite operation. We investigate the power of codes whose bipartite operation is non-signalling from Alice to Bob, positive-partial transpose (PPT) preserving, or both, and derive a simple semidefinite program for the achievable entanglement fidelity. Using the semidefinite program, we show that the non-signalling-assisted quantum capacity for memoryless channels is equal to the entanglement-assisted capacity. We also relate our PPT-preserving codes and the PPT-preserving entanglement distillation protocols studied by Rains. Applying these results to a concrete example, the 3-dimensional Werner-Holevo channel, we find that codes that are non-signalling and PPT-preserving can be strictly less powerful than codes satisfying either one of the constraints, and therefore provide a tighter bound for unassisted codes. Furthermore, PPT-preserving non-signalling codes can send 1 qubit perfectly over two uses of the channel, which has no quantum capacity. We discuss whether this can be interpreted as a form of superactivation of quantum capacity.

The theory of zero-error communication is re-examined in the broader setting of using one classical channel to simulate another exactly in the presence of various classes of nonsignalling correlations between sender and receiver i.e., shared randomness, shared entanglement and arbitrary nonsignalling correlations. When the channel being simulated is noiseless, this is zero-error coding assisted by correlations. When the resource channel is noiseless, it is the reverse problem of simulating a noisy channel exactly by a noiseless one, assisted by correlations. In both cases, separations between the power of the different classes of assisting correlations are exhibited for finite block lengths. The most striking result here is that entanglement can assist in zero-error communication. In the large block length limit, shared randomness is shown to be just as powerful as arbitrary nonsignalling correlations for exact simulation, but not for asymptotic zero-error coding. For assistance by arbitrary nonsignalling correlations, linear programming formulas for the asymptotic capacity and simulation rates are derived, the former being equal (for channels with nonzero unassisted capacity) to the feedback-assisted zero-error capacity derived by Shannon. Finally, a kind of reversibility between nonsignalling-assisted zero-error capacity and exact simulation is observed, mirroring the usual reverse Shannon theorem.

Two dual questions in quantum information theory are to determine the communication cost of simulating a bipartite unitary gate, and to determine their communication capacities. We present a bipartite unitary gate with two surprising properties: 1) simulating it with the assistance of unlimited EPR pairs requires far more communication than with a better choice of entangled state, and 2) its communication capacity is far lower than its capacity to create entanglement. This suggests that 1) unlimited EPR pairs are not the most general model of entanglement assistance for two-party communication tasks, and 2) the entangling and communicating abilities of a unitary interaction can vary nearly independently. The technical contribution behind these results is a communication-efficient protocol for measuring whether an unknown shared state lies in a specified rank-one subspace or its orthogonal complement.

We study the problem ofk-pair communication (or multiple unicast problem) of quantum information in networks of quantum channels. We consider the asymptotic rates of high fidelity quantum communication between specific sender-receiver pairs. Four scenarios of classical communication assistance (none, forward, backward, and two-way) are considered. (I) We obtain outer and inner bounds of the achievable rate regions in the most general directed networks. (II) For two particular networks (including the butterfly network), routing is proved optimal, and the free assisting classical communication can at best be used to modify the directions of quantum channels in the network. Consequently, the achievable rate regions are given by counting edge avoiding paths, and precise achievable rate regions in all four assisting scenarios can be obtained. (III) Optimality of routing can also be proved in classes of networks. The first class consists of directed unassisted networks in which (1) the receivers are information sinks, (2) the maximum distance from senders to receivers is small, and (3) a certain type of 4-cycles are absent, but without further constraints (such as on the number of communicating and intermediate parties). The second class consists of arbitrary backward-assisted networks with two sender-receiver pairs. (IV) Beyond thek-pair communication problem, observations are made on quantum multicasting and a static version of network communication related to the entanglement of assistance.

We consider asymptotic capacities of bipartite unitary gates. We present a gate with exponentially larger entanglement capacity than the total communication capacity. The key tool in our proof, which may be of independent interest, is a communication-efficient protocol for testing whether a bipartite quantum state belongs to a short list of candidate states.

In this paper, we prove unconditional security for a quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol based on distilling pbits (twisted ebits) from an arbitrary untrusted state that is claimed to contain distillable key. Our main result is that we can verify security using only public communication-via parameter estimation of the given untrusted state. The technique applies even to bound-entangled states, thus extending QKD to the regime where the available quantum channel has zero quantum capacity. We also show how to convert our purification-based QKD schemes to prepare/measure schemes.

In this correspondence, we study quantum communication in the presence of adversarial noise. In this setting, communicating with perfect fidelity requires a quantum code of bounded minimum distance, for which the best known rates are given by the quantum Gilbert-Varshamov (QGV) bound. Asking only for arbitrarily high fidelity and letting the sender and receiver use a secret key of length logarithmic in the number of qubits sent, we find a dramatic improvement over the QGV rates. In fact, our protocols allow high fidelity transmission at noise levels for which perfect fidelity is impossible. To achieve such rates, we introduce fully quantum list codes, which may be of independent interest.

Remote state preparation is the variant of quantum state teleportation in which the sender knows the quantum state to be communicated. The original paper introducing teleportation established minimal requirements for classical communication and entanglement but the corresponding limits for remote state preparation have remained unknown until now: previous work has shown, however, that it not only requires less classical communication but also gives rise to a tradeoff between these two resources in the appropriate setting. We discuss this problem from first principles, including the various choices one may follow in the definitions of the actual resources. Our main result is a general method of remote state preparation for arbitrary states of many qubits, at a cost of 1 bit of classical communication and 1 bit of entanglement per qubit sent. In this "universal" formulation, these ebit and cbit requirements are shown to be simultaneously optimal by exhibiting a dichotomy. Our protocol then yields the exact tradeoff curve for memoryless sources of pure states (including the case of incomplete knowledge of the ensemble probabilities), based on the recently established quantum-classical tradeoff for visible quantum data compression. A variation of that method allows us to solve the even more general problem of preparing entangled states between sender and receiver (i.e., purifications of mixed state ensembles). The paper includes an extensive discussion of our results, including the impact of the choice of model on the resources, the topic of obliviousness, and an application to private quantum channels and quantum data hiding.

Consider two quantum systems A and B interacting according to a product Hamiltonian H=H/sub A//spl ominus/H/sub B/. We show that any two such Hamiltonians can be used to simulate each other reversibly (i.e., without efficiency losses) with the help of local unitary operations and local ancillas. Accordingly, all nonlocal features of a product Hamiltonian - including the rate at which it can be used to produce entanglement, transmit classical or quantum information, or simulate other Hamiltonians - depend only upon a single parameter. We identify this parameter and use it to obtain an explicit expression for the entanglement capacity of all product Hamiltonians. Finally, we show how the notion of simulation leads to a natural formulation of measures of the strength of a nonlocal Hamiltonian.

We consider interactions as bidirectional channels. We investigate the capacities for interaction Hamiltonians and nonlocal unitary gates to generate entanglement and transmit classical information. We give analytic expressions for the entanglement generating capacity and entanglement-assisted one-way classical communication capacity of interactions, and show that these quantities are additive, so that the asymptotic capacities equal the corresponding 1-shot capacities. We give general bounds on other capacities, discuss some examples, and conclude with some open questions.

We expand on our work on quantum data hiding - hiding classical data among parties who are restricted to performing only local quantum operations and classical communication (LOCC). We review our scheme that hides one bit between two parties using Bell (1964) states, and we derive upper and lower bounds on the secrecy of the hiding scheme. We provide an explicit bound showing that multiple bits can be hidden bitwise with our scheme. We give a preparation of the hiding states as an efficient quantum computation that uses at most one ebit of entanglement. A candidate data-hiding scheme that does not use entanglement is presented. We show how our scheme for quantum data hiding can be used in a conditionally secure quantum bit commitment scheme.