Narrow Bounds for the Quantum Capacity of Thermal Attenuators
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Narrow Bounds for the Quantum Capacity of Thermal Attenuators 1, 2, 2 2 Matteo Rosati, ∗ Andrea Mari, and Vittorio Giovannetti 1F´ısica Te`orica: Informaci´oi Fen`omensQu`antics,Departament de F´ısica, Universitat Aut`onomade Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Spain 2NEST, Scuola Normale Superiore and Istituto Nanoscienze-CNR, I-56127 Pisa, Italy. ABSTRACT As usual in information theory, although a formula ex- ists for this quantity, it is quite difficult to compute for Thermal attenuator channels model the decoherence of general channels, due for example to the necessary reg- quantum systems interacting with a thermal bath, e.g., a ularization that takes into account the use of entangled two-level system subject to thermal noise and an electro- inputs over multiple channel uses [27]. The problem sim- magnetic signal travelling through a fiber or in free-space. plifies considerably for the so called degradable channels Hence determining the quantum capacity of these chan- [19, 28{31], but it also exhibits some striking features in nels is an outstanding open problem for quantum compu- other cases [32{36]. An important class of channels is tation and communication. Here we derive several upper that of Thermal Attenuators (TAs), which describe the bounds on the quantum capacity of qubit and bosonic effect of energy loss due to the interaction with a ther- thermal attenuators. We introduce an extended version mal environment. Common examples of this class are the of such channels which is degradable and hence has a qubit thermal attenuator or generalized amplitude damp- single-letter quantum capacity, bounding that of the orig- ing channel [7, 19] and its infinite-dimensional counter- inal thermal attenuators. Another bound for bosonic at- part given by the bosonic Gaussian thermal attenuator tenuators is given by the bottleneck inequality applied to [3, 4, 37]. Physically, the former is a good model for a particular channel decomposition. With respect to pre- the thermalization process of a two-level system (e.g. a viously known bounds we report better results in a broad single-qubit quantum memory) in contact with a ther- range of attenuation and noise: we can now approximate mal bath, while the latter is the standard description for the quantum capacity up to a negligible uncertainty for optical-fiber and free-space communications in the pres- most practical applications, e.g., for low thermal noise. ence of thermal noise. Notice that thermal noise at room temperature is not negligible for low-frequency electro- magnetic signals like, e.g., infra-red lasers, microwaves, INTRODUCTION radio waves, etc.. For example, a crude estimate of the thermal noise in a real communication channel can be The study of information transmission between distant obtained by using the Bose-Einstein distribution at the parties has attracted much theoretical attention since the desired wavelength to estimate the excess contribution to the mean photon number of the transmitted signal: seminal work of Shannon [1, 2], who gave birth to the 14 field of information theory by determining the ultimate this grows from O(10− ) at telecom wavelengths, i.e., limits for compression and transmission rate. The lat- 1550nm, and O(10) at microwave wavelengths, i.e., 1mm ter is called information capacity and it depends on the and above. Accordingly, although the thermal noise may specific channel that is used to model a physical trans- be negligible at telecom wavelengths, it becomes increas- mission process. Hence, since the information carriers ingly important as one spans the whole optical domain are ultimately governed by the laws of quantum physics, and it is a crucial parameter in the microwave domain. in more recent years there has been interest in analyz- Hence the study of information transmission on TAs is of ing the communication problem in a quantum setting, particular relevance for future quantum communication giving birth to the field of quantum communication and networks where hybrid interfaces will be employed, e.g., superconducting qubits connected by microwave commu- arXiv:1801.04731v5 [quant-ph] 11 Dec 2018 information theory [3{7]. Several results have been ob- tained so far, such as: an expression for the capacity of nication lines, see Refs. [38, 39]. In both the qubit and a quantum channel for the transmission of classical in- bosonic cases, the corresponding quantum capacity is formation [8{12] and its explicit value for some classes known [19, 40] only for a zero-temperature environment, of channels [5, 6, 13{19]; the use of entanglement [20] since in this limit both channels are degradable [28{30]. as a resource for communication [21, 22]; the capacity However the more general finite-temperature case breaks of a quantum channel for the transmission of quantum the degradability property and it has not been success- information, i.e., of states preserving quantum coher- fully tackled so far, apart from establishing some upper ence [23{26]. The latter is called quantum capacity of and lower bounds [41{43]. the channel and constitutes the main focus of this work. In this article we introduce a general method to compute new bounds on the capacity of any quantum channel which is weakly degradable in the sense of [29, 31]. It is based on the purification of the environment by ∗ [email protected] an additional system, which is then included in the 2 output of an extended version of the original channel. Degradability is restored for such extended channel and its quantum capacity can be easily computed, providing E E an upper bound on the capacity of the original channel, which is tight in the limit of small environmental noise. e This result applies to any weakly degradable channel Φη,N but, in order to be more explicit, here we compute the associated upper bound for both the qubit and continuous-variable thermal attenuators. Moreover, for Φη,N the Gaussian attenuator, we provide an additional bound ˆ (η) based on the bottleneck inequality applied to a twisted A UAE BF B version of the channel decomposition used in [15, 31, 44]. → Eventually we compare all our bounds with those already known in the literature and in particular with the recent results of [42, 43]. We show a significant improvement with respect to the state-of-the-art for a large region of attenuation and noise parameters, shrinking the unknown value of the quantum capacity ¯ ˜ e Φη,N Φη,N within an error bar which is so narrow to be irrelevant F ≡ for many practical applications. Figure 1. Unitary representation of a thermal attenuator RESULTS channel, its extended channel and their complementaries. The system A interacts with the environment E, which is Thermal Attenuator channels in a thermal state of mean energy N, via a linear coupling, ^ (η) UAE!BF. The parameter η determines the fraction of energy dispersed from the system into the environment, while the Let us consider a communication channel that connects total energy is preserved. The output of the channel Φη;N is two parties. The sender, Alice, wants to transmit the recovered by discarding the output environment F, while that quantum stateρ ^ S( ), represented by a positive ¯ A 2 HA of its weak complementary Φη;N by discarding the output sys- density operator of unit trace on the Hilbert space of the tem B. The two channels are called weakly complementary to system, A. At the other end of the channel Bob re- each other because E is in a mixed state and hence this uni- ceives a transformedH quantum state on the Hilbert space tary representation is not a proper Stinespring dilation. By B. Any physical transformation applied to the state purifying the input environment via an ancilla E', entangled H e during the transmission can be represented by a quan- with E, we obtain the extended channel Φη;N with output ~ e tum channel Φ, i.e., a linear, completely-positive and BE' and its strong complementary Φη;N with output F. Note ¯ trace-preserving map, which evolves the initial state as that the latter coincides with Φη;N . ρ^B = Φ (^ρA). The class of channels studied in this article is that of mode. Both situations are quite important for practical thermal attenuators, Φη;N , originating from the follow- ing physical representation (see Fig. 1). An energy- applications since they model the effect of damping and thermal noise on common information carriers, typically preserving interaction U^ (η) , parametrized by a trans- AE BF used in experimental implementations of quantum η !; missivity parameter [0 1], couples the input system information and quantum communication protocols. In ρ 2 ^A with an environment described by a thermal state the following we introduce in detail these two kinds of τ H^ H^ ^E exp( E), where E is the bath hamiltonian, of physical systems. dimension/ − equal to that of the system, and the state has h i ^ mean energy N = Tr HEτ^E 0 in dimensionless units. In order to describe a two-level system, we fix as a basis ≥ The total output state can be written as 0 and 1 corresponding to the ground and excited states respectively.j i j i In this basis we can represent a generally ^ (η) ^ (η) ρ^BF = UAE BF (^ρA τ^E) UAEy BF; (1) mixed quantum state with a density matrix: ! ⊗ ! while the action of the channel is obtained by tracing out 1 p γ the output environmental system F: ρ^ = − ; (3) γ∗ p Φ (^ρ ) = Tr [^ρ ] : (2) η;N A F BF where p [0; 1] is the mean population of the excited 2 2 This general framework is particularly relevant in the state and γ C is a complex coherence term, with γ 2 j j ≤ two paradigmatic cases in which the system is repre- p(1 p).