No Arabic abstract
One of the most sought-after goals in experimental quantum communication is the implementation of a quantum repeater. The performance of quantum repeaters can be assessed by comparing the attained rate with the quantum and private capacity of direct transmission, assisted by unlimited classical two-way communication. However, these quantities are hard to compute, motivating the search for upper bounds. Takeoka, Guha and Wilde found the squashed entanglement of a quantum channel to be an upper bound on both these capacities. In general it is still hard to find the exact value of the squashed entanglement of a quantum channel, but clever sub-optimal squashing channels allow one to upper bound this quantity, and thus also the corresponding capacities. Here, we exploit this idea to obtain bounds for any phase-insensitive Gaussian bosonic channel. This bound allows one to benchmark the implementation of quantum repeaters for a large class of channels used to model communication across fibers. In particular, our bound is applicable to the realistic scenario when there is a restriction on the mean photon number on the input. Furthermore, we show that the squashed entanglement of a channel is convex in the set of channels, and we use a connection between the squashed entanglement of a quantum channel and its entanglement assisted classical capacity. Building on this connection, we obtain the exact squashed entanglement and two-way assisted capacities of the $d$-dimensional erasure channel and bounds on the amplitude-damping channel and all qubit Pauli channels. In particular, our bound improves on the previous best known squashed entanglement upper bound of the depolarizing channel.
A complete analysis of multi-mode bosonic Gaussian channels is proposed. We clarify the structure of unitary dilations of general Gaussian channels involving any number of bosonic modes and present a normal form. The maximum number of auxiliary modes that is needed is identified, including all rank deficient cases, and the specific role of additive classical noise is highlighted. By using this analysis, we derive a canonical matrix form of the noisy evolution of n-mode bosonic Gaussian channels and of their weak complementary counterparts, based on a recent generalization of the normal mode decomposition for non-symmetric or locality constrained situations. It allows us to simplify the weak-degradability classification. Moreover, we investigate the structure of some singular multi-mode channels, like the additive classical noise channel that can be used to decompose a noisy channel in terms of a less noisy one in order to find new sets of maps with zero quantum capacity. Finally, the two-mode case is analyzed in detail. By exploiting the composition rules of two-mode maps and the fact that anti-degradable channels cannot be used to transfer quantum information, we identify sets of two-mode bosonic channels with zero capacity.
As with classical information, error-correcting codes enable reliable transmission of quantum information through noisy or lossy channels. In contrast to the classical theory, imperfect quantum channels exhibit a strong kind of synergy: there exist pairs of discrete memoryless quantum channels, each of zero quantum capacity, which acquire positive quantum capacity when used together. Here we show that this superactivation phenomenon also occurs in the more realistic setting of optical channels with attenuation and Gaussian noise. This paves the way for its experimental realization and application in real-world communications systems.
I show that classical capacity per unit cost of noisy bosonic Gaussian channels can be attained by employing generalized on-off keying modulation format and a projective measurement of individual output states. This means that neither complicated collective measurements nor phase-sensitive detection is required to communicate over optical channels at the ultimate limit imposed by laws of quantum mechanics in the limit of low average cost.
We aim to devise feasible, efficient verification schemes for bosonic channels. To this end, we construct an average-fidelity witness that yields a tight lower bound for average fidelity plus a general framework for verifying optimal quantum channels. For both multi-mode unitary Gaussian channels and single-mode amplification channels, we present experimentally feasible average-fidelity witnesses and reliable verification schemes, for which sample complexity scales polynomially with respect to all channel specification parameters. Our verification scheme provides an approach to benchmark the performance of bosonic channels on a set of Gaussian-distributed coherent states by employing only two-mode squeezed vacuum states and local homodyne detections. Our results demonstrate how to perform feasible tests of quantum components designed for continuous-variable quantum information processing.
The set of quantum Gaussian channels acting on one bosonic mode can be classified according to the action of the group of Gaussian unitaries. We look for bounds on the classical capacity for channels belonging to such a classification. Lower bounds can be efficiently calculated by restricting to Gaussian encodings, for which we provide analytical expressions.