Igor Devetak

The private classical capacity and quantum capacity of a quantum channel

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

Distillation of secret key and entanglement from quantum states

We study and solve the problem of distilling a secret key from quantum states representing correlation between two parties (Alice and Bob) and an eavesdropper (Eve) via one–way public discussion: we prove a coding theorem to achieve the ‘wire–tapper’ bound, the difference of the mutual information Alice–Bob and that of Alice–Eve, for so–called classical–quantum–quantum–correlations, via one–way public communication. This result yields information–theoretic formulae for the distillable secret key, giving ‘ultimate’ key rate bounds if Eve is assumed to possess a purification of Alice and Bobs joint state. Specializing our protocol somewhat and making it coherent leads us to a protocol of entanglement distillation via one–way LOCC (local operations and classical communication) which is asymptotically optimal: in fact we prove the so–called ‘hashing inequality’, which says that the coherent information (i.e. the negative conditional von Neumann entropy) is an achievable Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen rate. This result is known to imply a whole set of distillation and capacity formulae, which we briefly review.

The mother of all protocols: restructuring quantum information's family tree

We give a simple, direct proof of the ‘mother’ protocol of quantum information theory. In this new formulation, it is easy to see that the mother, or rather her generalization to the fully quantum Slepian–Wolf protocol, simultaneously accomplishes two goals: quantum communication-assisted entanglement distillation and state transfer from the sender to the receiver. As a result, in addition to her other ‘children’, the mother protocol generates the state-merging primitive of Horodecki, Oppenheim and Winter, a fully quantum reverse Shannon theorem, and a new class of distributed compression protocols for correlated quantum sources which are optimal for sources described by separable density operators. Moreover, the mother protocol described here is easily transformed into the so-called ‘father’ protocol whose children provide the quantum capacity and the entanglement-assisted capacity of a quantum channel, demonstrating that the division of single-sender/single-receiver protocols into two families was unnecessary: all protocols in the family are children of the mother.

Correcting Quantum Errors with Entanglement

We show how entanglement shared between encoder and decoder can simplify the theory of quantum error correction. The entanglement-assisted quantum codes we describe do not require the dual-containing constraint necessary for standard quantum error–correcting codes, thus allowing us to “quantize” all of classical linear coding theory. In particular, efficient modern classical codes that attain the Shannon capacity can be made into entanglement-assisted quantum codes attaining the hashing bound (closely related to the quantum capacity). For systems without large amounts of shared entanglement, these codes can also be used as catalytic codes, in which a small amount of initial entanglement enables quantum communication.

A Resource Framework for Quantum Shannon Theory

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.

The Quantum Reverse Shannon Theorem and Resource Tradeoffs for Simulating Quantum Channels

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 IID 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 non-tensor-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.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.

Multiplicativity of Completely Bounded p-Norms Implies a New Additivity Result

AbstractWe prove additivity of the minimal conditional entropy associated with a quantum channel Φ, represented by a completely positive (CP), trace-preserving map, when the infimum of S(γ12) − S(γ1) is restricted to states of the form

Capacity theorems for quantum multiple-access channels: classical-quantum and quantum-quantum capacity regions

(\mathcal{I} \otimes \Phi)\left( | \psi \rangle \langle \psi | \right)