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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 positivity of a channel’s coherent information. A corollary of this theorem gives a simple dimensional test for a channel’s capacity. Applying this corollary solves an open problem by characterizing all qubit channels whose complement has non-zero capacity. Another application shows a wide class of zero quantum capacity qubit channels can assist an incomplete erasure channel in sending quantum information. These results arise from introducing and linking logarithmic singularities in the von-Neumann entropy with quantum transmission: changes in entropy caused by this singularity are a mechanism responsible for both positivity and non-additivity of the coherent information. Analysis of such singularities may be useful in other physics problems.

 

Communication networks have multiple users, each sending and receiving messages. A multiple access channel (MAC) models multiple senders transmitting to a single receiver, such as the uplink from many mobile phones to a single base station. The optimal performance of a MAC is quantified by a capacity region of simultaneously achievable communication rates. We study the two-sender classical MAC, the simplest and best-understood network, and find a surprising richness in both a classical and quantum context. First, we find that quantum entanglement shared between senders can substantially boost the capacity of a classical MAC. Second, we find that optimal performance of a MAC with bounded-size inputs may require unbounded amounts of entanglement. Third, determining whether a perfect communication rate is achievable using finite-dimensional entanglement is undecidable. Finally, we show that evaluating the capacity region of a two-sender classical MAC is in fact NP-hard.

 

Abstract Quantum teleportation is one of the fundamental building blocks of quantum Shannon theory. While ordinary teleportation is simple and efficient, port-based teleportation (PBT) enables applications such as universal programmable quantum processors, instantaneous non-local quantum computation and attacks on position-based quantum cryptography. In this work, we determine the fundamental limit on the performance of PBT: for arbitrary fixed input dimension and a large number N of ports, the error of the optimal protocol is proportional to the inverse square of N . We prove this by deriving an achievability bound, obtained by relating the corresponding optimization problem to the lowest Dirichlet eigenvalue of the Laplacian on the ordered simplex. We also give an improved converse bound of matching order in the number of ports. In addition, we determine the leading-order asymptotics of PBT variants defined in terms of maximally entangled resource states. The proofs of these results rely on connecting recently-derived representation-theoretic formulas to random matrix theory. Along the way, we refine a convergence result for the fluctuations of the Schur–Weyl distribution by Johansson, which might be of independent interest. 

All correlation measures, classical and quantum, must be monotonic under local operations. In this paper, we characterize monotonic formulas that are linear combinations of the von Neumann entropies associated with the quantum state of a physical system that has n parts. We show that these formulas form a polyhedral convex cone, which we call the monotonicity cone, and enumerate its facets. We illustrate its structure and prove that it is equivalent to the cone of monotonic formulas implied by strong subadditivity. We explicitly compute its extremal rays for n ≤ 5. We also consider the symmetric monotonicity cone, in which the formulas are required to be invariant under subsystem permutations. We describe this cone fully for all n. We also show that these results hold when states and operations are constrained to be classical.