Leading order corrections to the quantum extremal surface prescription

We show that a naïve application of the quantum extremal surface (QES) prescription can lead to paradoxical results and must be corrected at leading order. The corrections arise when there is a second QES (with strictly larger generalized entropy at leading order than the minimal QES), together with a large amount of highly incompressible bulk entropy between the two surfaces. We trace the source of the corrections to a failure of the assumptions used in the replica trick derivation of the QES prescription, and show that a more careful derivation correctly computes the corrections. Using tools from one-shot quantum Shannon theory (smooth min- and max-entropies), we generalize these results to a set of refined conditions that determine whether the QES prescription holds. We find similar refinements to the conditions needed for entanglement wedge reconstruction (EWR), and show how EWR can be reinterpreted as the task of one-shot quantum state merging (using zero-bits rather than classical bits), a task gravity is able to achieve optimally efficiently.

Quantum capacity analysis of multi-level amplitude damping channels

Evaluating capacities of quantum channels is the first purpose of quantum Shannon theory, but in most cases the task proves to be very hard. Here, we introduce the set of Multi-level Amplitude Damping quantum channels as a generalization of the standard qubit Amplitude Damping Channel to quantum systems of finite dimension d. In the special case of d = 3, by exploiting degradability, data-processing inequalities, and channel isomorphism, we compute the associated quantum and private classical capacities for a rather wide class of maps, extending the set of models whose capacity can be computed known so far. We proceed then to the evaluation of the entanglement assisted quantum and classical capacities.

Asymptotic Performance of Port-Based Teleportation

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.

Communication Enhancement through Quantum Coherent Control of N Channels in an Indefinite Causal-Order Scenario

In quantum Shannon theory, transmission of information is enhanced by quantum features. Up to very recently, the trajectories of transmission remained fully classical. Recently, a new paradigm was proposed by playing quantum tricks on two completely depolarizing quantum channels i.e., using coherent control in space or time of the two quantum channels. We extend here this control to the transmission of information through a network of an arbitrary number N of channels with arbitrary individual capacity i.e., information preservation characteristics in the case of indefinite causal order. We propose a formalism to assess information transmission in the most general case of N channels in an indefinite causal order scenario yielding the output of such transmission. Then, we explicitly derive the quantum switch output and the associated Holevo limit of the information transmission for N = 2 , N = 3 as a function of all involved parameters. We find in the case N = 3 that the transmission of information for three channels is twice that of transmission of the two-channel case when a full superposition of all possible causal orders is used.

Quantum Shannon theory with superpositions of trajectories

Shannon's theory of information was built on the assumption that the information carriers were classical systems. Its quantum counterpart, quantum Shannon theory, explores the new possibilities arising when the information carriers are quantum systems. Traditionally, quantum Shannon theory has focused on scenarios where the internal state of the information carriers is quantum, while their trajectory is classical. Here we propose a second level of quantization where both the information and its propagation in space–time is treated quantum mechanically. The framework is illustrated with a number of examples, showcasing some of the counterintuitive phenomena taking place when information travels simultaneously through multiple transmission lines.

Decoupling with random diagonal unitaries

We investigate decoupling, one of the most important primitives in quantum Shannon theory, by replacing the uniformly distributed random unitaries commonly used to achieve the protocol, with repeated applications of random unitaries diagonal in the Pauli-Z and -X bases. This strategy was recently shown to achieve an approximate unitary 2-design after a number of repetitions of the process, which implies that the strategy gradually achieves decoupling. Here, we prove that even fewer repetitions of the process achieve decoupling at the same rate as that with the uniform ones, showing that rather imprecise approximations of unitary 2-designs are sufficient for decoupling. We also briefly discuss efficient implementations of them and implications of our decoupling theorem to coherent state merging and relative thermalisation.