IQI Weekly Seminar

One of the main goals in quantum information theory is to establish the capacity of a quantum channel for communicating various kinds of information, whether it be bits or qubits. While several communication capacities of quantum channels are now known, the characterization of capacity in many of these cases is often limited to it being a threshold that determines the rates at which reliable communication is or is not possible. This characterization might be satisfactory for some purposes, but it leaves open the possibility for a trade-off between communication rate and error probability (that is, one might think that it would be possible to send data at a higher rate by allowing for errors to occur some of the time). However, we now know that such a trade-off is not possible for many quantum channels and capacities of interest. The seminar will focus on quantum communication capacity and a recent result establishing the Rains information of a quantum channel as a strong converse bound for quantum communication when using the channel many independent times. We also settle an open question posed by Rains, namely, to show that the Rains bound for entanglement distillation represents a strong converse rate for this task. The main application of our first result is to settle the strong converse question for the quantum capacity of all generalized dephasing channels.

This is joint work with Marco Tomamichel and Andreas Winter (arXiv:1406.2946).