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It has been conjectured that counterfactual communication is impossible, even for post-selected quantum particles. We strongly challenge this by proposing exactly such a counterfactual scheme where---unambiguously---none of Alices photons that contribute to the message from Bob have been to Bob. We demonstrate counterfactuality experimentally by means of weak measurements, as well as conceptually using consistent histories---thus simultaneously closing both loopholes. Importantly, the fidelity of Alice learning Bobs bit can be made arbitrarily close to unity.
A series of recent works has shown that placing communication channels in a coherent superposition of alternative configurations can boost their ability to transmit information. Instances of this phenomenon are the advantages arising from the use of communication devices in a superposition of alternative causal orders, and those arising from the transmission of information along a superposition of alternative trajectories. The relation among these advantages has been the subject of recent debate, with some authors claiming that the advantages of the superposition of orders could be reproduced, and even surpassed, by other forms of superpositions. To shed light on this debate, we develop a general framework of resource theories of communication. In this framework, the resources are communication devices, and the allowed operations are (a) the placement of communication devices between the communicating parties, and (b) the connection of communication devices with local devices in the parties laboratories. The allowed operations are required to satisfy the minimal condition that they do not enable communication independently of the devices representing the initial resources. The resource-theoretic analysis reveals that the aforementioned criticisms on the superposition of causal orders were based on an uneven comparison between different types of quantum superpositions, exhibiting different operational features.
A $((k,n))$ quantum threshold secret sharing (QTS) scheme is a quantum cryptographic protocol for sharing a quantum secret among $n$ parties such that the secret can be recovered by any $k$ or more parties while $k-1$ or fewer parties have no information about the secret. Despite extensive research on these schemes, there has been very little study on optimizing the quantum communication cost during recovery. Recently, we initiated the study of communication efficient quantum threshold secret sharing (CE-QTS) schemes. These schemes reduce the communication complexity in QTS schemes by accessing $dgeq k$ parties for recovery; here $d$ is fixed ahead of encoding the secret. In contrast to the standard QTS schemes which require $k$ qudits for recovering each qudit in the secret, these schemes have a lower communication cost of $frac{d}{d-k+1}$ for $d>k$. In this paper, we further develop the theory of communication efficient quantum threshold schemes. Here, we propose universal CE-QTS schemes which reduce the communication cost for all $dgeq k$ simultaneously. We provide a framework based on ramp quantum secret sharing to construct CE-QTS and universal CE-QTS schemes. We give another construction for universal CE-QTS schemes based on Staircase codes. We derived a lower bound on communication complexity and show that our constructions are optimal. Finally, an information theoretic model is developed to analyse CE-QTS schemes and the lower bound on communication complexity is proved again using this model.
A recent quantum protocol for counterfactual communication [Y. Aharonov and L. Vaidman, Phys. Rev. A 99, 010103(R), 2019] relies on post-selection to eliminate the weak trace in the transmission channel. We show that the post-selection in this protocol also eliminates the flow of Fisher information from transmitter to receiver. However, we also show that a classical communication protocol with post-selection can be counterfactual. Hence, we argue that post-selection should not be allowed in genuine counterfactual communication. In the quantum counterfactual communication protocol, the probability of discarding an event by post-selection tends to zero with an increasing number of ideal optical components. But the counterfactual violation strength tends to infinity at a faster rate. Consequently, the quantum protocol is not counterfactual proper.
We consider the problem of transmitting classical and quantum information reliably over an entanglement-assisted quantum channel. Our main result is a capacity theorem that gives a three-dimensional achievable rate region. Points in the region are rate triples, consisting of the classical communication rate, the quantum communication rate, and the entanglement consumption rate of a particular coding scheme. The crucial protocol in achieving the boundary points of the capacity region is a protocol that we name the classically-enhanced father protocol. The classically-enhanced father protocol is more general than other protocols in the family tree of quantum Shannon theoretic protocols, in the sense that several previously known quantum protocols are now child protocols of it. The classically-enhanced father protocol also shows an improvement over a time-sharing strategy for the case of a qubit dephasing channel--this result justifies the need for simultaneous coding of classical and quantum information over an entanglement-assisted quantum channel. Our capacity theorem is of a multi-letter nature (requiring a limit over many uses of the channel), but it reduces to a single-letter characterization for at least three channels: the completely depolarizing channel, the quantum erasure channel, and the qubit dephasing channel.
Given one or more uses of a classical channel, only a certain number of messages can be transmitted with zero probability of error. The study of this number and its asymptotic behaviour constitutes the field of classical zero-error information theory, the quantum generalisation of which has started to develop recently. We show that, given a single use of certain classical channels, entangled states of a system shared by the sender and receiver can be used to increase the number of (classical) messages which can be sent with no chance of error. In particular, we show how to construct such a channel based on any proof of the Bell-Kochen-Specker theorem. This is a new example of the use of quantum effects to improve the performance of a classical task. We investigate the connection between this phenomenon and that of ``pseudo-telepathy games. The use of generalised non-signalling correlations to assist in this task is also considered. In this case, a particularly elegant theory results and, remarkably, it is sometimes possible to transmit information with zero-error using a channel with no unassisted zero-error capacity.